'Shindig'
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 watched 3:10 to Yuma yesterday (the newer one) because I'm kind of working on a Christian Bale obsession. I really enjoyed it, and was particularly impressed by Crowe, who I'm normally sort of meh about.
I thought the director's commentary was interesting, too; he said he'd put a lot of thought into modern westerns and why so many of them didn't work. And I was particularly pleased that he said it was a buddy movie, because early on I was comparing it to Midnight Run.
I saw Quantum of Solace, today.
They killed Mathis, those bastards !
I thought the director's commentary was interesting, too; he said he'd put a lot of thought into modern westerns and why so many of them didn't work.
3:10 to Yuma was one of those movies that I was really happy I decided to listen to the commentary.
Speaking of commentaries... check out the director's commentary for "Out of Sight", which is a great movie, probably one of my personal Top Ten. He doesn't say so explicitly, but you can tell that Soderbergh worked SO HARD with J-Lo to get that performance. Which is possibly why she's never been that good again.
oh, that's interesting.
Via Slashdot, 75 Comics Being Made Into Films. Holy shit.
Damn. They include several that they don't think will actually make it, but still, damn.
Sad to see that the Tintin trilogy is still having trouble getting off the ground.
They include several that they don't think will actually make it
I would wager that more than half of these will never make it.
We watched the extended version of
Brotherhood of the Wolflast night. It makes more sense, in that it's possible to follow what's happening, but no more sense in terms of WTF would anyone think THAT was a good idea?!?
But then I started (over)thinking, and it's got a lot going on. There's the obvious thing where the "Brotherhood of the Wolf" is killing wolves and scapegoating them, but Mani and Fronsac are the actual brothers of the wolves. They never say what Fronsac's totem is, although presumably Mani read it for him. I'm guessing wolf or lion.
Then there's some neat motifs of disguise: Everyone first appears as something else, from the soldiers dressed as women to Mani in European garb, to the Brotherhood themselves, to the Vatican spy. Even the wolf presented to the court is a fictional construct, as is La Bete (which turns out to be wearing a disguise too.
Only the Marquis le Mullet stays the same, but even he is first shown as an old guy about to be (deservedly? we don't know) guillotined, and it's only at the end that we recognize the Revolution took the good with the bad.
And, aside from Monica Bellucci's costumes being amazing, there were some neat costuming choices: Marianne wears red at first, like the rest of the Brotherhood (even when not in BotW uniform) but as she realizes her own identity she starts wearing blue.
Most impressively, the movie had a theme - what is savagery? Who are the real animals? - rather than just being a slasher flick.
I'm still not sure I'd recommend it for anything beyond Mani's fighting...but hey. An attempt at depth.
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On a different topic, I titled my QoS review "Previously Drilled Oil Fields."