i fell asleep during traffic

Crash (1996), starring James Spader , was a pretty good, freaky movie. Not as long as Traffic, so you might not fall asleep

Days of Heaven
It always gets praise in the movie drafts and I had never seen it so I slid it to the top of my queqe. Kinda slow, sorta boring and a few things that really annoyed me. Nice visuals though and a story that shoulda been more interesting than it was. The fact that they are from Chicago and all have heavy Brooklyn sounding accents upset me. Especially the annoying young sister/narrator whose voice and accent drove me up the wall. The sound editing was horrifically bad. I watched the whole movie constantly raising and/or lowering the volume since parts were way to loud followed by parts way to low to hear what people were saying. Woulda, coulda, shoulda been a lot better.
C-

Billy Jack Goes to Washington
Loose remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington modernized with with Half-breed ex green beret Billy Jack instead of James Stewart. I liked the original Billy Jack but it hasn't aged well and I absolutely love The Born Losers the first Billy Jack movie and I consider The Trial of Billy Jack to be the absolute worst movie ever made. I had never seen this one before though. I can't really recommend it.
D-

My response in an animated gif below



What do you think of Malick's other films?

Yes It had the plots of two good movies and one made for TV melodrama in there. I was waiting for it to end twenty minutes before it did.

Had to go look to see what he made. I've only seen a few others. I remember liking Dirty Harry but I haven't seen it in years. I was underwhelmed by Pocket Money. How does a movie with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin not be great? But it wasn't. I completely loved the written by but not directed by Deadhead Miles, And I thought The Thin Red Line was one of the most miserable movie experiences of my life.

Terrance Malik didn't make any of those but the last one.

The sound is one of the best parts of the film, but I think what you find inconsistent is intentional. Malick threw away much of the dialogue during the editing--and then obscured a good deal of what remained.

Yeah but he wrote them. I guess Dirty Harry was an uncredited rewrite though.

I found it annoying a distracting. I realize he purposly obscured the dialog at the open when he killed the factory guy and that was fine. But the uneveness of the sound throughout the rest of the movie was very distracting.

This was intentional.

From the" Hegemony of the Eye" to the" Hierarchy of Perception": The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image In Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven

Sick title

So is Malick a you-either-love-him-or-hate-him director. Just watched A New World and found it a borefest. More internal narration than dialogue almost. Hardly any story, he seems to have replaced story with visual images and symbolism.

Malick is a "i don't understand his films so i hate them" kind of director IMO

Well, I was confused for most of the movie about what his narrative was and what he was trying to say. But I think I figured that out by the end. (The ending was reasonably satisfying) But I don't really care what he wants to say or what his message is. I want an entertaining story first, and fair enough if there is some deeper meaning below that.

Thread just made me very sad. I hear this all the time, about people not liking (even "hating") The Thin Red Line.

It strikes me as an indefensible position.

I can understand not liking Days of Heaven (even though I love it), because it's not nearly as accessible.

But The Thin Red Line is a beautiful film, and very accessible.

Maybe these are the same people who hated Magnolia, another movie that gets a lot of inexplicable hate.

Just finished Last Year At Marienbad. I am very glad I did no research prior to watching.

First, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick simply MUST but Renais some sort of gift. Maybe they can get together and get him something REALLY nice.

Many have panned this as pretentious and incomprehensible, which I suppose I can understand, people being what they are.

But the film is neither. Being bravely different does not make something pretentious, and having a non-traditional (or even non-existent) narrative does not make it incomprehensible.

I will not seek to give my interpretation here, other than to say that it seems to me the thing is about the ineffability of memory, and the resonating effect of events and people on other people (and, possibly, even on a place).

It is the rare film that is so oblique in intention that it forces you to determine its value and meaning to you. It's like being in the childrens' "discovery" wing of the museum.

And this is not by mistake, it seems.

I really hated both Crash and Traffic. I found them both to be sooooooo far fetched, especially Crash. I almost found them insulting because of the way they just hammered their points in to the viewer, instead of being a bit more subtle and letting the viewer figure out what the film was trying to get across. To me at least, it felt like the writer/director/whatever thought I was too stupid to figure out what he was trying to say, so he just spelled it out for me.

The only saving grace for either was Don Cheadle, and wow at Brendan Frasier and Sandra Bullock. Just god awful performances, even though I felt they had the most moving story line.


I watched Sexy Beast over the weekend, excellent film.

Ben Kingsley gets all the love for that film, but the truly great performance in that film belongs to Ray Winstone.

Seems to me the acceptable Crash (from JG Ballard's novel), and the unacceptable Crash (from the fiery pit of Hell) are being mixed up.

Couldn't agree more. I felt like Kingsley was the same as Penelope Cruz in Blow. Just a bunch of yelling. Good performance, but really just a bunch of yelling and screaming.

I really loved Winstone in The Proposition. Just wanted to throw that out into the world.

Bobby Fischer Against the World
HBO documentary on the life of Fischer. Very interesting and a very tragic story of tortured genius. I like documentaries in general and I have always been interested in both chess and Fischer. I remember how the Spassky matches back in 1972 were front page news and I followed them closely and this shows a lot of the behind the scenes there. Also shows that he wasn't alone in his paranoid insanity and that it is more common than you would think in world class chess.
B+

I knew you would like it. There's a BFI book devoted to it that's not as good as it could have been, but it does do a nice job of exploring the relationship between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet in the creation of the film.

Columbiana was bad bad bad. I didn't have much expectations but I thoroughly disliked it. It's paced terribly and attempts to be slightly different from other revenge films but it misses the mark big time.

The Help almost saved by Davis and Spencer (they were fantastic). Have you guys ever seen the fake trailer for The Shining? I'm honestly wondering whether the same guy put together the trailer for The Help.

If there were a category for cliche/cheap tears/overdone, I would file this right along with: The Notebook, Marley and Me, and My Sister's Keeper