'Heart Of Gold'
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I am now of the mind that 2005 will be my favorite movie summer in a while. With Serenity AND Batman, how could it not be?
I mean, 2003 had X-Men 2, and, well, nothing else I cared about. 2004 has Bourne Supremacy. Guess 2002 had the Identity. But I'm not big on the summer blockbusters, typically.
I guess Spider-Man was in there somewhere, both 1 and 2. But the excitement level for that was not nearly as high.
So what's supposed to be so damn good about The Triplets of Belleville ? I just watched it and I'm pretty meh about it. Also meh on Touch of Evil and meh with a touch of eh on Welcome to the Dollhouse.
I thought "Touch of Evil" was sexy but weird. The other ones, I've not seen.
Polter-Cow, I am so very sorry, but you are now DEAD TO ME. I just want to crawl inside the world of Touch of Evil and roll around in it for days and days, or dark lurky nights and dark lurky nights. The goggle-eyed desk clerk! Marihuana! Orson Welles' colossal, decaying, repellant and horribly tragic monster of an alter ego! Marlene Dietrich's mostly improvised dialogue (especially Your future's all used up )! Janet Leigh's little lacy teddy! That best-ever-in-the-history-of-anything long, long opening shot! The final shot of Quinlan! Buh... buh... buh... All that, and more, and you're all meh?
weeps
I share your Triplets of Belleville "eh?", PC.
More Truffaut--I watched Shoot the Piano Player and it's one of the most alive movies I've ever seen, which is ironic because it's about a guy who would like nothing better than to withdraw from life for good. It was filled with so many little touches and tangents that it really felt like life, truly real, even though it wasn't filmed in a ultra-realistic way. Fantastic editing and use of music, too.
Yeah, true. Can he just keep this one? Please?
I hope it's not close to the one he used for Laurel Canyon. It'd be nice to have at least a tiny part of me that doesn't want to hump Batman. (This was SO not a problem in the days of West or Keaton...)
Triplets is just so wonderfuly weird. and great music.
The appeal of The Triplets of Belleville, to me, was the atmosphere, and all that that encompassed: the music, the animation, the lack of dialogue, the oddity of all the characters. I can see it not being someone's cup of tea, but I loved it.
Polter-Cow, I am so very sorry, but you are now DEAD TO ME.
It just struck me as yet another corrupt cop story, and I like my corrupt cop stories with more meat in them (take, for instance, L.A. Confidential ). In its defense, I've been regularly falling asleep during everything for the last week or so, and the library DVD is scratched, causing it to skip terribly at points. It failed to draw me in. For classic noir, give me Sunset Boulevard. It has a monkey.
That best-ever-in-the-history-of-anything long, long opening shot!
Okay, so it was kind of cool, in a "Wow, how did he manage to pull this off way back then?" kind of way, but the actual content of the shot was disappointingly mundane. I think the opening shot of Halloween is fair competition.
I just saw Cube, which finally broke my streak of meh. A bunch of people wake up trapped in this grid of cube-shaped rooms, and they try to get out. Except there are booby traps everywhere. So they begin to search for patterns in the chaos, all the while trying to understand why they're there in the first place.
It's a great little idea for a movie because not only does it come with a built-in metaphor for human existence, but you get to use the same set over and over!
The first half especially handles the metaphor well, often very subtly, and in the second half, it pretty much shifts to full-out thriller mode. Oh, and it's mathy!
The acting is subpar at times, and the characterizations are a bit wonky (I wasn't quite sure who I was supposed to find likable, because they were all unlikable at times, but then again, that's people for you), but it's definitely worth checking out. (There's a sequel starring Kari Matchett (Beth from Wonderfalls ), but it looks to be a sequel in the "Let's remake the movie with totally different characters!" sense...and there appears to be a third one coming out soon. But this movie doesn't need a sequel.)