Monday, December 30, 2013

favorite coen brothers movies

Inside Llewyn Davis: A (great!)
A Serious Man: A+ (best!)
The Big Lebowski: A+
Raising Arizona: A
Blood Simple: A

also this past weekend:
Suspicion (1941): B- (not the best Hitchcock movie but still fun - lame ending)
Jane Eyre (1943): A

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

forgot one

from a couple months back:
Spring Breakers: A (pretty good!)

from this past weekend:
The Godfather 2: B
新天龙八部之天山童姥: B+ started out pretty confusing but got pretty good. typical Louis Cha warring kung fu factions stuff, with Gong Li vs Brigitte Lin!

next weekend (edit on 12-23):
Elysium: C (neat special effects, etc, but the plot was super dumb and the logical problems were glaring. is LA the only city left on earth? does living in outer space make you completely retarded?)

Sunday, December 1, 2013

moovies

Frankenstein Conquers the World (フランケンシュタイン対地底怪獣バラゴン): B+ (pretty good!)
Man of Steel: C (much better than i expected. special effects were good *except* in the over-the-top violence, where they just made everything look like it was made out of confetti rubber. also, some severely idiotic logical problems.)

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

film: real quick now

had a good weekend movie run lately:

melancholia: A+ (excellent in all ways)
Gravity: A- (too much soliloquy)
the Way Way back: B- (cliched but better than i expected)
Europa Report: A- (maybe kind of ridiculous but pretty good)

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

movie: the great gatsby

OKAY. i have not read the famous book.

now that's out of the way, and i can criticize.

1. bad editing and bad camerawork. it took me a full 30 minutes to adapt to the 2-cuts-per-second editing. there were several scenes where the sense of space was so twisted and confused that i almost thought it was on purpose - maybe it was, but it seemed out of place. one scene, where nick first meets gatsby, was so frustrating the way you couldn't see anything or understand which direction was which, but i suppose it was to simulate nick's confusion. aside from this possibly effective scene, the overall effect of the movie was disorienting, which i don't see how it was a plus.

2. everyone talked like a ghost on some sort of relaxant. slow and bored. and when they didn't, they sounded like they were sitting on a stage reading out of a book. which maybe fits with the idea that the narrator is writing a book, but why do they all have to sound like they're reading one, and that they're being so careful not to mispronounce any words? did people really talk so slowly in 1922?

3. list of improbable coincidences (i'm sure Gatsby scholars have written reams on these):
a) nick happens to live just a town away from his cousin Daisy. sure, maybe that was even on purpose.
b) nick happens to live next door to Gatsby, who happens to have been in the same army unit, and who happens to be in love with Daisy. this is highly improbable.
c) Gatsby/Daisy happen to run over Tom's girlfriend. this is unexplainable.

a) is actually fine, because we figure that Nick put himself there on purpose, to be closer to his cousin, though they don't really seem that close. b) is just impossible, enough so to make me entertain the idea that Nick is a false character, that he's not really there, just plugged in to tell the story. i guess Fitzgerald needed a neutral narrator, having already come up with the story. so this is a literary device that isn't actually crucial to the story. you can subtract Nick and it doesn't really matter. c), though, i can't figure out. it's so blatantly unreal. maybe.. only as a symbol. it symbolizes something. it's so contrived and unrealistic that it can't be meant to be taken literally. that then makes the whole story seem false, like a charade on top of something else that's hidden. very suspicious.

movie: C+
my idea of the book: a confused B

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

movie: world war z

watched world war z this weekend. at least it was free, but it took 2 hours. it wasn't good at all. a series of escape-from-zombies vignettes, each with serious logical flaws, and virtually no zombie gore. none of it made any sense, really. the conclusion was idiotic. worst zombie movie i've ever seen. the mass panic effects were okay, though without any zombie gore punctuating them, pretty empty.

WWZ: D minus.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

movie: pacific rim

saw pacific rim last night then got a headache on the train ride home. giant robots versus giant monsters. A+! best movie of the year decade so far.

Monday, July 29, 2013

procrastination

all right, so, it came up in conversation today, and i thought, i'm going to go write down a quick review of the 'new' star trek movie. i gave it a C below. it was barely a C.

the new star trek is not star trek at all, for one thing. i like the characters. it's a movie series with star trek characters in it, except that spock is not really spock anymore. kirk is good. spock has spock's mannerisms i guess, but he's like a punching machine. his biggest scene in the whole movie is jumping around punching another guy in the head, dozens of times. punch punch punch. it's like the end of an MMA fight where you're so relieved the ref comes in to put an end to it, except there it's really punching and it looks painful. in this movie, the endless head punching looks like a guy with a foam rubber fist punching a guy with a stone face. if you want to illustrate brutality, why make it so breezy?

earlier in the movie, the same guy, Khan, gets punched in the head dozens of times by kirk. in multiple other places that same guy murders a bunch of security guards or klingons or other people by hand. and there are bombs that go off and kill lots of people, and airship attacks on buildings that kill lots of people. and a starship crashes into a city and kills lots of people. half of the movie is explosions and punching and murdering. star trek!

so, really, that's my review of Star Trek Into Darkness. endless punches in the head and explosions.

you might say, hey, other star trek movies are full of the same stuff! and yeah, the last episode of TOS i watched ('Court Martial') ended with kirk wrestling with a jealous crewmate; the one before that (they show TOS episodes on saturday nights on a local broadcast) was 'Arena', which has plenty of brutality. but the movies on average have been much less violent than the violent series episodes, especially the best movies. a list:

The Motion Picture: very little violence, except for the introduction of V'ger, where some klingon ships are destroyed. sets up V'ger as very dangerous, and that's it.
Wrath of Khan: notably no repeated head punching. most violent scene is a starship battle.
Search for Spock: murder of David, which is played up as an actual *death*. klingons portrayed as brutal murderers, mostly by dialogue.
Journey Home: my favorite. not one head punch, not one murder. some whalers attempt to murder a whale, and are stopped by a klingon battleship manned by Kirk and co.
The Final Frontier: honestly don't remember... i don't think it had much violence, at least not prominently.
The Undiscovered Country: okay, here's where it started to go downhill. lots of assassination and space battle, some of which is very reminiscent of ...Into Darkness (or serves as fodder for reminiscence upon... you know). i always liked this one, but watching it years later the main thing that bothered me was how *old* they all look. it seems kind of ridiculous, watching a much of old people running around shooting phasers at eachother. anyways.

Generations: ends with a fistfight (and wreck of the enterprise), terrible, terrible movie. the fistfight ending is the model for the two New Star Treks.
First Contact: everyone loves this one, but it ruined the borg. Picard's big brutal borg-slaying scene where he gets all emotional is the worst part of the movie, in combination with alfre woodard who just doesn't belong. aside from that it was okay.

The last two TNG movies i barely remember, neither were very good.

To sum up, we have ST movies that ended with (categories are not mutually exclusive):
Communication: The Motion Picture; The Journey Home
An Act of Violence: Wrath of Khan; Search for Spock; The Final Frontier; The Undiscovered Country; all the rest....
Preventing an Act of Violence: The Journey Home
A Sacrifice: Wrath of Khan; Generations; Nemesis (these latter two are sacrifice gambits to destroy enemies)
Fist Fight (subtype of AoV): Generations; (Insurrection? not sure..); New Star Trek; Into Darkness

The TV show was always better. Should get some violence stats on the shows...

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

more

3:10 to Yuma (2007): B
Wuthering Heights (1939): A

*edit*
some more i forgot:
西遊·降魔篇 (journey to the west: conquering the demons): A
shaolin soccer: B+
一代宗师 (the grandmaster): B

*edit again*
中国合伙人 (american dreams in china): C

中国合伙人

中国合
中国合伙人
中国合伙人
中国合伙人

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

hey hey hey

list of movies i have seen in the last couple of months, with letter grades by yours truly:

star trek into darkness: C+
girl with a pearl earring: B+
tree of life: A+
(legend of) fong sai yuk: B
the hobbit (part 1): D-
rope: A
cloud atlas: C
the dark knight rises: B
rear window: A
blue valentine: B
django unchained: C+