i fully agree but kotfm is worth the pain imo, months later i still occasionally think about it

I don’t really mean it’s a chore because it’s not interesting I just mean it’s a bit of a chore because finding 3.5+ hours with no distractions at home is pretty hard for me to do. I watched it over the course of like 5 days.

no it's a tedious film to watch, the opposite of entertainment

Was looking for a non-thinking movie, an action movie, and found this new one called Land Of Bad, about a Seal Team rescue Op of 4 men, with Liam Hemsworth as one of the 4 soldiers who HALO into the South Philippines and Russell Crowe as the "eye-in-the-sky guy back in Vegas, dropping bombs on **** and leading Hemsworth back to safety.

Pretty good...especially if you like a well-shot, tense, military-porn type of action movie, like I do. I was pleasntly surprised.

Rewatched Heat tonight. It’s unbelievably good still 30 years later. Def in my top 5

I could watch De Niro and Amy Brenneman looking out over LA at night with synth music in the background, talking about running away to New Zealand, forever.

just finished watching Rosetta Stoned https://rosettastonedthemovie.com/buy-or-rent/

it's an independently made film that was made by a former 2p2 member who plays poker for a living and made this on the side with his own poker monies

i enjoyed watching it, really impressive for a first time film made by an amateur who didn't even make student films beforehand

it's a teenage stoner film but well crafted with realistic characters/motivations and handles autistic characters exceedingly well

the ending felt a little abrupt and with some conflicts only implied to be resolved (imo. feel like they were resolved just not rammed down your throat and more of an implied "they've figured x out" rather than the speech the character gives at the end closing things up tidily with a closing monologue) but the film was solid throughout with a bunch of genuinely funny laugh out loud moments for me (and that doesn't often happen with me)

definitely rec renting/buying it and watching even if it weren't the "support indy films made by those in our community" aspect to it

here's the trailer

Ricky Gervais highlights the website, Does the Dog Die, in his recent Netflix special. Viewers ask about a number of triggers in films. Currently, 186 triggers are covered on the site. You can add your own.

I would add:


Do English professors maintain a sense of decorum during department meetings?

Does anyone say "This is more of a statement than a question."

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2023 Cannes Film Festival

Palme d’Or: “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet

Grand Prix: “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer

Director: Tran Anh Hung, “The Pot au Feu”

Actor: Kōji Yakusho, “Perfect Days”

Actress: Merve Dizdar, “About Dry Grasses”

Jury Prize: “Fallen Leaves,” Aki Kaurismaki

Screenplay: Sakamoto Yûji, “Monster”

I was in the Same boat last night... I chose 1936 Plainsman by Cecile de Milles...

Revisionist, yes... Racist, yes... EPIC Film making, HELL YES.

Watched Solaris, Soderbergh's, again tonight.

Both this version and Tarkovsky's original are great films. Sure, films can, and often should, be pure entertainment, but they can also force us to ask the sorts of questions we often don't pose to ourselves. What is memory? How do we apprehend time? How do we face our own mortality (in one scene in the film Clooney's character says we are not really different from sharks, but a dinner guest says we are the only creatures aware of our own mortality)? How is it that we love others?

Should we always ask ourselves these questions? Of course not. There's baseball and spaghetti and wine and just plain silliness and old friends and stuff to talk about and whatever else we like.

I think of those people in my life who mean so much to me, to whom one day I will only be a memory. I remember my late wife on her birthday today and think good thoughts.

So amidst all the mundane tasks, the things we love to do, and the things we detest, great films, great art provides us a necessary time out to pause and ask ourselves this question: What does it mean to be human?



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john, what are the odds you'll get your class to watch rosetta stoned?

I saw a bit in a recent video that I can’t remember but it was about sex scenes in films. That’s a worthwhile debatable topic, but someone actually stated…. ahem…. “But did the characters themselves consent to being filmed having sex…”

Really??

I only think of regret... things unsaid, promises unkempt and joys unrealized.

It is only close to death that I truly feel alive.

For some reason we were discussing Nic Cage films, and then Con Air (1997) came up as a Jeopardy! question this week so we felt obliged to watch.

My god. I don't remember it being like this, but what an editing nightmare. I think I got epilepsy from the amount of screen changes. It was unlike anything I could think of seeing in recent memory.

ban imo

It's been proven... Montages can trigger epileptic events.

Happy birthday to your wife, John. May her memory give you peace.

Also, Solaris is an amazing film.

The Zone Of Interest, Johnathan Glazer.

Glazer is one of those filmmakers who disappears for year and then shows up with a stunning masterpiece.

The Zone Of Interest is not an entertainment. It is a piece of art with a capital A. It is not meant to be enjoyed, but to be thought over and felt and maybe make us think about our capacity to lie to ourselves and be monsters.

It is about the Kommandant of Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII, and his family of 6 living next door, on the other side of the wall, in a beautiful, pastoral garden and comfortable home. They swim in the river, tend their huge gardens, the kids go to school, they have friends over, and live a normal, loving life.

And feet away, Jews are being incinerated by the thousands every day.

The movie is not a standard narrative. We just see the family go about their daily lives, and their Jewish house maids and gardeners - the lucky Jews - cater to them as servants. The Kommandant is doing his best to impress Himmler and Hitler and his other superiors, by killing as many people as they can. His wife gets a daily package of "recovered" possessions from the camps, like a mink coat, and various Knick-knacks. Stolen from now dead Jews. She also casually threatens her servants with what her husband can do to them when she is in a bad mood.

What makes this movie brilliant, and possibly the best movie of the past 5 years, is that we are never shown the horror just over the wall. We sometimes catch a glimpse of the chimney belching it's horrific aftermath and the glow of the evil fires. Instead, we hear - just barely - screams and gunshots and the ever-present industrial groaning of the ovens, always in the background but never stopping.

I was shook after watching...especially the ending. Glazer cuts to the present day, showing Auschwitz now and the remnants of suitcases and shoes of thousands of victims behind glass in the now-museum, as workers clean and polish the place.

The Zone Of Interest is about the banality of evil to its logical conclusion. How true horror can be happening only feet away and yet be ignored by those doing the evil.

This is a masterwork of filmmaking and a movie I never want to see again.

cosign on everything Dominic wrote.

last month when I reviewed it here as well. I think it's a movie that should be showed to every high school senior

also don't want to watch it again.

Dom,

I just came back from seeing it. I agree with your review, and if I hadn't gone alone, I would have been stunned into silence, which I was anyway.

That ending, though, I think with Hoss retching, it's as if he's looking into the future the way the corridor in the Holocaust museum resembles the hallway he stands in.

I had to look up how the negative imagery shots were done. I figured it was just using a negative image, but Glazer used a special camera to shoot it and upscaled the footage to 4K.

We know that sound is important, but this film makes you feel just how important it is, making the viewer aware just what is happening out of sight, a sound that the Hoss family doesn't even register.

I need to think about the effect the film had on me more, the way Glazer keeps the camera away from the characters. The only closeups are of flowers.

Perhaps nothing in the film conveys the banality of evil more than Mrs Hoss trying on the fur coat and applying the lipstick.



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For a number of years now, I have been showing Resnais's Night and Fog to my classes. Most of my students are just out of high school. The film ends with these words:

"We survey these ruins with a heartfelt gaze, certain the old monster lies crushed beneath the rubble. We pretend to regain hope as the image recedes, as though we’ve been cured of the plague of the camps. We pretend it was all confined to one country, one point in time. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us, and a deaf ear to the never-ending cries . . .”

The new executioners look just like us.

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It's amazing that a movie like that would be nominated for best picture at the Oscars...they don't usually go for difficult art films, you know?

What got me was the scene with the little boy in his room playing with his army men, and he hears his father outside telling a soldier to drown another child in the river because he was fighting with another child over an apple.

Watching Indiana Jones now. After All of Us Strangers and Zone of Interest, I need some entertainment.

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