I'd have to agree with this, I was very very excited to see this and even turned it off after the first 5 minutes because I genuinely thought I was watching a classic and wanted to watch it with my flatmate.

We turned it off halfway and u finished it alone in 3 sections. The acting is phenomenal; I just didn't get the story. How Phoenix missed out on an Oscar is beyond me (as much as I loved Lincoln)

9/10 for the acting
5/10 for the film

The Imposter

This documentary is showing on Netflix Watch Instantly. If you haven't seen it already, you need to watch it NOW. I haven't had such a "WTF?" reaction since I watched Dear Zachary.

Watch It. Do It Now. We'll start a separate thread for it once enough people have watched to discuss.

Cute when a film goes over your head and immediately that makes it a bad film.

Watched Hoop Dreams for the first time a couple of days ago. I knew it was supposed to be great, but I did not expect it to be _this_ great. Perfect documentary and maybe the most moving film I've ever seen.

Watched a couple of other interesting documentaries as well: My kid could paint that which touches on some of the same things Exit Through the Gift Shop did, but I definitely prefer this one. Very good. Also really enjoyed The Cruise which I think was mentioned a few times in the previous thread. That dude is a bit much, perhaps, but I dunno I really liked him for the most part.

What movie is that?

Side by Side, which Dom mentioned above, is a fine look at digital vs. film, and a good primer for those who think digital a superior medium. The ending, with its warnings about preservation of the digital medium, is a bleak one, and I find the rather sanguine hopes of those who embrace digital naive at best.

The Truman show

First time id ever watched it from beginning to end. It's actually very good.

Big Fish

One of the few Tim Burton movies I found really satisfying. I always find his movies visually interesting but often think they don't tell much of a story or fail to engage with me, not this one.

I've always felt this was an underrated gem. I left the theater in love with this story and I'm glad it's still finding some fans.

Underrated??

it received a huge number of award nominations and a lot of people claim it's one of their favorite tear jerk-movies of all time.

Looks like it got an Oscar nom for music. Guess I was just hoping it'd pull down a nomination in at least one major category. And maybe I just don't run in the circles where people talk about favorite tear jerk movies or something. Hopefully I am wrong and there are throngs of people loving Big Fish out there somewhere. Deserves it.

Saw Skyfall last night and didn't think it was that good.


One thing I thought was weird was

I haven't seen the film, but this seems like a very myopic view of the situation. Yes, film produces a much more beautiful picture, yet it also costs much more and is much less convenient. The lower costs of digital enable many more indie and low-budget films to get made, with more voices in the typically narrow film world which I think is worth the trade-off. Would there even be a Lena Dunham [insert your low-budget filmmaker here] without digital?

I can happily live in a world with fewer indie films.

You should just get in your coffin and close the lid then.

John Sayles, John Cassavetes and Spike Lee all figured out how to make indie films on, well, film. I'm sure Lena Dunham could, too. Tiny Furniture is pretty bad, though, on either medium.

Yup, 20+ years ago (prob should be more like 30+), John Sayles, John Cassavettes, and Spike Lee made indie films on film. I wonder if things have changed at all since then so that making this comparison is just a wee bit ridiculous?

C'mon. You know as well as I do that the likelihood that those directors would have used digital film if it had been around then as it is today is very very high.

Did you not hear Robert Rodriguez in Side by Side? He wouldn't have been able to make Sin City without digital film. How many other modern movies that use high tech effects would say the same thing now? The possibilities that digital opens up are exciting and denying that just because the picture doesn't look quite the same is backwards thinking. I'm sure there will be a movie that comes out in a couple years where you won't even be able to tell whether it was shot in 35mm or digital because they'll have found a way to manipulate the digital to look exactly the same as 35mm. What other possible objection would you have to digital then?

The question I have for the argument brewing in this thread, and the one made in Side by Side, is: why can't there be both? Why do we have to prove one is better than the other? Digital is just another tool. Use it if you think it's a better fit for your story, and use film otherwise. If you wanted to make a film that takes place entirely on the set of an 80's talk show, why not shoot in on Beta, for example? Choose the best format to tell your story and stop arguing about which one is better than the other.

It's undeniable that affordable HD formats have opened the door for a whole new generation of independent filmmakers. If JC isn't interested in what they're saying, that seems like more a question of personal taste, but I do think it's important to point out that many of these filmmakers are extremely young and it's likely that the HD-Digital-DSLR movement is going to launch the careers of many directors we will one day call great -- much like the VHS/film-school movement did for budding young filmmakers in the 90's (Tarrantino, Linklater, etc). In the end, a good story well told is a good story well told -- wether the frame has 100K pixels or 2MM pixels.

I'm fine with both. I Like digital.

I don't disagree with you, but you know it won't happen simply due to the economics behind it all. One format takes away money from the other in this zero-sum game of film making. Technicolor can't stay in business if they don't have enough 35mm to process, which goes ditto for all of the other unique jobs specifically involved along the process of 35mm film.

OK, I finally got to end of Side by Side and I've got to call bs on the whole storage issue that they're raising. Wasn't it George Lucas who built this expensive, high-tech fault to store the film of the original Star Wars movies so that it wouldn't degrade? And yet, when he went back to the fault in the 2000s or so to upgrade and re-release the original movies, he found that the negatives had still eroded and degraded despite every extreme precaution that he had taken?

Film degrades, but it can be restored, and we do still have films that were made in 1895. If Lucas had done proper storage, there would have been no chance the negative had eroded. I can also live in a world without Sin City, which I've always found ugly and repellent.

And digital works in some situations; c.f. Collateral.

Love Truman Show! It's one of those movies you can pick up at any point during the movie and still be entertained, IMO at least.

Saw The Imposter on NF instant. Def recommend.

Just watched Jack Reacher.

I didn't expect anything much and didn't find it exceptionally good but I wasn't dissapointed either. Entertaining, worth a watch.

I thought The Imposter was ok. The first half was crazy but the story fell flat at the end for me. I think Dear Zachary was a far better/crazier story.

Cabin in the Woods - not good. not worth watching. i expected it to be scarier, but it wasn't really at all. mostly just some gory scenes, and kinda weird. acting was terrible too.