+1. Also, Ryan Gosling always shines, but I think Kelli Garner gives a really memorable performance in this as well. She charmed me, at least.

Unfortunately, I don't read nearly as much as I should (or want to), but I have this on my "future reading list". I'll bump it up a few notches based on your recommendation, but since I only read about 12-15 books a year, it could be a while. Thanks for pointing out the youtube vid -- really helpful for an illiterate like me

I double-checked this after I posted this, and it's not on youtube, it's on NYTimes, but if you google "Cheever Updike Cavett" it pops right up. It's just thrilling to hear them talk, although Cavett gets in the way a lot.

Inside Deep Throat - Warning, this one shows a few seconds of the act.

Much better than I thought it would be. It goes into the mob influence behind the film's financing and theater showings. Kinda scary. Gets into Nixon's and Reagan's bogus pornography commission efforts. (Nixon's people came up with a report showing porno was harmless for adults, so he suppressed it; Ed Meese, under Reagan, famously chaired an effort that relied on no science at all and just promulgated his ideas as though they were facts and everyone should adhere to them as law.) It took a brief but rare look at the repressiveness of women's lib at the time. And there were good interviews with the main players, from actors and producers to a distributor. People like Gore Vidal make appearances, Vidal as sharp as ever but cutting a little more quietly than usual. A short but good social history played out through the device of examining this one film's making and impact. Recommended for all but those predisposed to despise such discussions.

Champion -- A biography of Danny Trejo, the rough-faced, heavily tattooed actor who co-starred in Heat, Animal Factory, Spy Kids, and a number of other movies. Trejo started out life in a home that was severe and uncomfortable, but not unloved. For a long time he idolized his uncle, who first got him into crime and then harder and harder drugs. They robbed together, went to prison together, and did everything but die together. His uncle handled that alone, after Trejo had sworn off the criminal life.

For many, their ears will prick up merely at the mention that the extraordinary Edward Bunker, Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs and author of No Beast So Fierce, which was later turned into the movie Straight Time starring Dustin Hoffman and introducing the astounding Theresa Russell, was Trejo's mentor in the movies and introduction to the business. Trejo had shown up on a set and got asked to be an extra; Bunker spotted him and remembered him from their old crime and prison days (Bunker sold Trejo's uncle a crime plan or two), and got him hired instead to teach a star how to box. Trejo had been the San Quentin lightweight and welterweight boxing champ.

Reminiscences from actors like Dennis Hopper and Val Kilmer, social workers, and others fill out the story of Trejo's life. Some are shot inside San Quentin, and a bit of a tense and moving scene comes almost out of nowhere when Trejo sits on a bunk in a cell for a moment and is hit and shaken by memories.

Turns out that Trejo turned into quite a guy after quite a bad start. "Anything good that ever happened to me came from helping somebody else," is a line he repeats often and with conviction. Besides being an actor, he is a drug counselor. He also finds the worst school he can wherever a movie is shooting and goes and tries to put the drug and crime-addled lifestyle into perspective for the kids before the make too many of the wrong choices.

Well worth watching and highly recommended. Trejo comes off as having that rare change of heart and applied positive focus we'd all like to believe is the low-hanging fruit in this life for anyone who tries, but which for many is impossibly far off in the distance.

Both these flicks are on Netflix instant watch as of 3/12/2010.

wow, I really want to see both of those films, Blarg. I'm a big Trejo fan.

Me too, but it was always at the surface before, just because he seemed like a cool and fun actor. And I really loved him in Heat. Now I have an added layer of respect for him and can't help but feel like I wish him well.

It's funny how sometimes I feel like the last thing I want to see is another documentary, but then I find the right documentary and I can't turn away from the screen.

edit: By the way, in the last post I said these were available on Netflix on 3/12/2010. Typo! They're available today, 2/12/2010 as far as I know. I watched them yesterday.

New York, I love you

Blech, what a sloppy mess. I wanted to like it, but I just couldn't find a way. There was a lot of nice photography, but it's not even in the same league as "Paris, Je T'aime". I was disappointed.

defiance- i really liked it. a bit long at times, but showed a nice balance of action and romance/drama (w/ plenty of other issues aside from just the germans). good movie, worth a watch.

Finally got around to the Coen's A Serious Man and also watched The Assasination of Jesse James. Expert cinematography by Roger Deakins on both films. In fact, Jesse James, with that moody soundtrack, lovely cinematography, and voice over narration reminds me of Malick's Days of Heaven.

Particulary liked the use of sound in A Serious Man, which seems brilliantly done. The Coen brothers excel at this special kind of dark comedy, and it's done here as well, I think, as in Fargo.

both of these are amazing films. The train robbery in James is among the best looking scenes in film history.

watched A Serious Man last night. it was amazing.

You should watch "Come and See." A film made in Belarus about Belarussian partisans in WWII.

Great call.

While I love the entire film, that scene stands out. It's really quite a thing.

I am awaiting some further commentary on Syndromes and a Century.

I sort of got the impression you were not going to fully comment on it until someone else had both watched it and commented on it.

My comments are clear as day fifteen or so posts back. I have made the effort, and enjoyed it. At least I enjoyed thinking about it.

No, I enjoyed it.

So....?

Now, I want to hear what you have to say about it.

It's weird that I usually don't pay much attention to the use of sound except for when watching Coen brothers movies, when I'm just blown away with how great they are. NCFOM was just awesome in this regard.

The ending of A Serious Man is perhaps the most perfect of any film in the last ten years.

yes, this movie is great

Attack Girls Swim Team Vs. The Undead

The students and teachers of a Japanese all-girl high school recieve a vaccine for a phony disease. The vaccines turn out to be some kind of potion that turns people into homicidal zombies. After some random nude shower scenes, masturbating, and lesbian hand jobs, the members of the school's swimming team discover that the only antidote to the vaccine is water from the swimming pool, because of the chlorine. Except the teachers got a special potion which is unaffected by chlorine. The only one who can fight the zombie teachers is the strange new student, Aki.

For some reason, one of the zombie teachers speaks in broken english as she's chasing and murdering students, all the rest of the dialogue is in Japanese.

A cheesy B movie. Not recommended.

Recently I've become very interested in a website called Fanedit.org, where fans recut movies into something completely different. A lot of them are "meh, that was fun," but some are radically different, and in some cases radically better. For example, the Hacked! cuts of the Matrix sequels turn pieces of crap into watchable films. In this version, Neo is no longer "the one," no longer has real-world super-powers, and has a reworked ending that leads into sequels. My favorite changes in spoilers.

I can't seem to find private joker's first review of this movie since his raves about it are what inspired me to go see it so I will just be giving my raw thoughts here:

A Single Man - written, directed, and produced by fashion designer Tom Ford

This movie is beautiful to look at as everything - the colors, the sets, the actors - are very gorgeous and sumptuous. And of course everyone is immaculately dressed (ldo). Overall, all of the actors in this movie were very good, especially Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. This hyper-stylization of every visual element in this movie is its greatest strength...but ultimately created a very stale and superficial emotional feeling imo (more on this later). This movie takes place in the early 1960s with Colin Firth's character, Prof. Falconer, a British professor who teaches English language classes at a small Califonria college, has lost his long-time male partner of 16 years due to a car accident. After months of grief and depression, he has decided to end his life and the movie depicts his final days as he prepares himself for his death. The entire movie is relentlessly told through Falconer's POV as we are shown how he sees the world supplemented by repeated voice overs. (I'm not much of a fan of a lot of voice overs in movies as I think that they're a pretty lazy story-telling device.) Even before the death of his long-time love, Falconer seems to be a somewhat repressed, cynical and melancholic character so framing the movie from only his POV necessarily imbues it with the same qualities, which may be why it seemed so emotionally arid to me. Add this on top of the extremely sytlized view of the movie itself and I was left with little to no feeling at all about it other than the thought, "well, that was nice to look at." It never felt poignant to me (except for one tiny part where Colin Firth cries but that was more due to his acting ability than anything else).

Also, I have some other major qualms with this movie but they need to be spoilered:


Also, there was a techinque used often in which the shot would be framed in such a way that object of the character's gaze would be situated in the corner of the frame and somewhat cut off. Intially, this was interesting and somewhat different but it quickly became annoying through overuse as I never felt that I actually got to see things fully. I'm not talking about the zooming in on eyes and lips part - that was fine. But when Falconer would be looking at another person's face, often that face would appear in a corner of the frame instead of in a more central position.

I will recommend it - more as a rental movie than one to go see in the movie theater though.

Also, pryor15, if you're reading this, I was hoping that you may expand a little more regarding your earlier comments how the editing was poor for this movie. What do you mean by that exactly?

Lynch

Watched on Netflix Instant this morning before digging in the ice and snow some more.

The very nice thing about this documentary is that is depicts exactly what it intended to show: an artist creating art and living the life of an artist.

Sometimes we forget that a guy like David Lynch is not sitting up in the Hollywood hills with robot butlers and stables of pony girls.

Quite the contrary, really...it appears ALL he does is make art. He does sound recording, makes furniture, makes films (obviously), paints, is an excellent photographer, creates textiles, does broadcast art, etc etc.

It's actually quite impressive how 100% immersed he is in being an artist.

Couple this dedication and commitment with the simple fact that so much of what he does is really worthwhile, and you have a compelling figure.

I live in the middle of the city campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art, and I think they should show this film as an entrance requirement.

Maybe all of the art students would walk around splattered in paint or plaster or composing or something, rather than shouting on my sidewalk about beer pong wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt while they await another check from mom for some pot.

Ron, I'm surprised you say that movie isn't worth watching. Sounds like a great flick.

Big Fan - Patton Oswalt was really good and I was very shocked by the ending. In a good way. I liked it quite a bit more than I expected.

Definitely make an effort to see A Prophet when it comes out. It's better than any of the Oscar best picture noms imho. So's White Ribbon for that matter.

I just watched "The Longshots", with Keke Palmer & Ice Cube.