I loved Collateral. There was a quality to the dialogue and its delivery that made me feel as if I were watching a play more than watching a movie. Plus, I was able to forget within two minutes that I was watching Tom Cruise in one of the leading roles.
'Out Of Gas'
Buffista Movies 5: Development Hell
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.
(Or is there a flick called Colleral?)
You'd never know I posted that at 3am our time.
I liked it as a film. The way it was presented took me out of it slightly, as it just looks a bit... different. It's weird, I don't know -- I actually like handheld shot films, or moments in film, as they can add an intimate touch to something (see also: Children of Men). It's possibly just the digital thing which is noticable to me. Or maybe I'm just wrong.
The Avengers was just playing in my hotel room. I was liking it! So delightfully bad!
No, it was just bad. Not to mention insulting to fans of the original.
I still laugh at the shots of Uma Thurman's double climbing up that ladder in the catsuit. I'm sure it was extremely difficult finding a stunt double of Uma's body type but the shocking difference in ass size was just silly..
Well, in non-bad movies:
As if I wasn't salivating enough to see it ASAP, Pan's Labyrinth has a 98 on metacritic after 20 reviews. A 98! That is BY FAR the highest score I've ever seen on a new movie, at least one with more than a few reviews. (ROTK was at 100 with 5-6 reviews, but dropped to a more reasonable 90ish by the end).
ETA: Apparently, it is currently the third-highest rated movie ever on Metacritic. Number 1 is The (perfect 100) and number 2 is, of all things, Superman II (though it doesn't have a lot of reviews to get its 99). Fourth is Dr. Strangelove, with a 96.
I know he's not a movie buff unless the films have some sort of space conveyance in them, but George Stevens ranks up there with Cecile B. DeMille and Orson Wells and Alfred Hitchcock as directors that changed not only how movies are made and viewed, but Hollywood itself.
Well, without George Stevens I never would have imagined John Wayne as a Roman centurion at Christ's crucifixion, but I don't think that's quite what you meant.
Collateral was also Michael Mann -- he's one of the few directors out there today who really knows how to shoot in digital, instead of just treating it like cheap film.
Unfortunately for the DVD market, what both Collateral and Miami Vice show off brilliantly about digital cinematography is how much rich/crisp detail you can get out of very dark night scenes, which isn't something most TVs are able to reproduce, especially after it's been downcoverted to standard def.
28 Days Later was shot digitally on the cheap, and IMHO is perhaps the prettiest horror movie I've ever seen. Props to the cinematographer.
The difference in output device is really a big deal, which I did not understand until I started watching DVDs on my computer. On the TV, low-contrast comes out fine. On the monitor, dark, murky and dark.
(Unless I am doign something wrong with the monitor, but, the brightness and contrast are as high as they can go! I can only watch sunny musicals and comedies on my computer, as a result.)