This times one million! Great film

Moving is probably the wrong word since I don't mean it in the sense of emotionally. I meant in the sense of a plot in which it's continually pushing forward and actions are continually occurring. I personally think this is a weakness of a lot of "cerebral" modern filmmaking in which vague character development is substituted for an actual plot.

I think it's better if character is revealed through plot rather than plot through character. Action movies, including Transformers, do the first and it's to their credit that they do so.

Going to the cinema today, Place Beyond the Pines or Iron Man 3? All the rest is junk (Evil Dead, Scary Movie x+1, 21 and over, Olympus has fallen etc etc).

Did you like Blue Valentine? Derek Cianfrance accomplished another great film with Pines.

Haven't seen it but on balance Pines seems like a smarter choice, not a big fan of the recent crop of Marvel superhero films (even though they are meant to be good) and I hate sitting next to teenagers in the cinema. Pines it is.

Robot & Frank. I don't know how to explain it other than I enjoyed it.

Upstream Color was.. different. The kinda stuff right out of dreams. I felt like I was dreaming, floating along, observing, just taking things in as they happened without really reacting... that happy, surreal feeling...and oddly enough when the nutso freak dream parts happened I reacted exactly like I would if I were dreaming (wake up! wake up!, this can't be happening, how is this happening.. wow etc).

Sounds promising. I'mma check this out. The plot is clear and moving, right?

Was there not a time when you watched movies that you would now describe as bad? I still have fond memories of some pretty mediocre movies.

But i think the point SimpleSam is trying to make is that movies dont have to be complicated to be good or fun. And that is something CLovis and the like sometimes seem to suggest. Maybe you are not, but it does sound like that sometimes.

Yeah, sure. And I try to stay open to as wide a range of films as I can. In theory, I think it would be "wrong" of me to categorically dismiss any of these (sub-)genres or disqualify in advance any movie x that comes out of genre y. At most, I might mentally stick a big "Caution" sign on some sub-genre whose films I repeatedly failed to enjoy (so far.) But judging movies on a case-by-case basis is the way to go, I think.

Maybe that's what she's saying? And I was mostly kidding in that last post upthread. But Sam's been a little cryptic so far, so it's hard to tell what her actual argument is, or how she's defining various concepts.

My favourite film of all time is Before Sunset which is the furthest thing from complicated, unless you mean emotionally. A film does not need to be complicated to be good. If fact, the Clovis correlate (if I can be so bold as to name it after myself) stipulates that budget and film quality are inversely correlated which suggests that "complexity" would be equally correlated.

Well, this is more than likely why we disagree because I don't really consider Before Sunset to be a movie. What it really is is a filmed play. And I don't say that with any scorn for Before Sunset - I really like it too. But if you judged it purely on a filmic level, it's not interesting at all. There's nothing at all innovative about the way in which it is shot and/or put together. There's little to nothing in terms of plot - which I would argue - would turn off 95% of its viewers and they are justified in being turned off by it. The viewer who doesn't like Before Sunset and prefers Transformers is not wrong. The discussions of plot and how important it is to drama have been around for thousands of years. And because Before Sunset willfully and purposefully omits basic plotting, then I don't see how you can really expect it to have many fans.
And because of this, it doesn't automatically make people who dislike/are indifferent to Before Sunset wrong/stupid/inferior for preferring a movie like Transformers to it.

I think Before Sunset and Transformers 1 are both good movies.

Sam,

No.

I would say yes to moving and no to clear but ymmv

Underwhelmed by Iron Man 3. I enjoyed it enough to say it's a good movie but nowhere near as good as 1, and an improvement over 2 which isn't saying a lot.

Agree this was a very good speech, couple other parts I really liked:

Incorrect, Evil Dead rocks

Evil Dead sucks

One of those love or don't care about sort of things, for me its the latter. Probably because I hate horrors (some thrillers are good though, 1408 f.ex)

No it has some virtues. Great cinematography for example.

Evil Dead positives: cinematography, score, practical special effects. That's all it has going for it.

Yeah, I'd agree with that, plus a few scenes that made you pull a WTF face. I also think the guy that played Eric is someone we'll see again in future. I was amused by how much punishment the Eric character took - if someone was going to get stabbed/hit/nailgunned, it was always Eric first

I also liked how it tied a few of the disparate and there-just-for-****s-n-giggles moments in the original into a coherent narrative. The tree rape made sense, the staying there even though one character is spooked made sense, and the means of possession made sense - unlike in the original. However, it also had things in there that just didn't make sense (eg the weird extra mutant characters in the first sequence - who the hell were they? And stuff like it was a family cabin, but somehow it has been used for weird cat-death rituals since the last visit)

I did think the claim on the poster about it being terrifying was ridiculous. There was very little scare in it. Intense, sure, terrifying, no.

It was entertaining though.

Disclaimer: I'm not in the movie business, I'm just a guy that loves to watch movies.

Despite his negative outlook I think he should be excited, it's like now is the time, things are coming to a head, its fight or flight baby. Is he and others like him just going to cave in? quit? No way, I don't believe it for a second. I feel like some really cool things are going to happen in the near future

One twist really disappointed me, but I thought it was great.

I don't know what Soderbergh is whining about there has been plenty of great cinema lately.