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By Collin, on December 29th, 2010

#5 We just watched this on Netflix streaming. You should too!

The Film: Amadeus

What a great movie. One of the best. I can’t believe I’d forgotten what a classic movie it is! “But Collin (me), isn’t that a biopic of Mozart? Sounds fucking boring and stupid. Meeeh.” Eh, it is a Mozart epic. But it is so good.  A three hour movie? Entertaining!????? You bet ya’.

Why to watch it: It is one of the better movies you’ll ever see.

The movie took a huge risk with the its tone. How can a three hour tragic film be quirky and funny? I don’t really know to be honest. But it works, big time. I promise you this movie is really entertaining. And this is mainly because of its two leads F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce.

Pay attention to this: F. Murray Abraham’s performance

Indeed, Hulce took it to the house with Mozart. Making him goofy, silly, funny, and likable. It was key to the movie. But what is more key is Abraham being empathetic. He is indeed the “bad guy”. But being jealous of the natural talents of others is so human we feel strongly for him. If he had been merely villainous, it would have been a lesser likable movie.

Instead, we’re wooed by Abraham’s charm even when he’s doing bad deeds. His talents as a musician are just mediocre enough to realize the audacious genius of another composer.


Watch this right now when you get home from work or school or whatever it is you’re doing….you should be watching this instead. And if you don’t have Netflix streaming….buy it. It costs the same as a shot and a beer at your local bar!

By Collin, on December 29th, 2010

The Fighter – Was it good?

What an awesome movie….and I HATE sports films. Hate them.

Hoosiers? Sucks.

Rudy? Don’t get me started…

Cinderella Man? Eh…

Who cares if a team or person wins a sport. I don’t really even like Rocky. I’ll watch when it is on, but c’mon, does anyone really care about a boxing match?

Raging Bull is one of the best movies ever made because it focuses on one human being and how his greatest gift is always his greatest downfall. Very Shakespearian.

What makes The Fighter so good is that it isn’t about the boxing but about the people around the boxer. The fights could not have been shown and the movie might have been as effective. It is a character drama based around a family who is trying to pull themselves out of lackluster lives.

The film centers around Mickey Ward and his brother Dick Eklund. In college I saw Eklund in the documentary their making in the The Fighter called “High on Crack Street”. It was required viewing in college. The real life Dick seems to be a little more hardcore then the one depicted by Bale.

Regardless, Bale is uncanny as Dick. It might be the best performance made this year and the first great one of his career. He has never really had a performance I’ve been floor by. Sure, he is really good as Batman, but c’mon, it ain’t Daniel Day-Lewis shit.

Here he seems to be at the top of his form. There is even a moment where he is so skinny and smiling so big he looks JUST like he did in Empire of the Sun. Maybe you’ll see the part.

Wahlberg rocks the Mark Wahlberg character, which is always awesome. It made him a star and for some reason always works. His soft spoken but bad boy delivery of lines is timeless.

His physical preparation for the movie is what is shocking. Bale will get all the kudos for his appearance, but he just didn’t eat. Wahlberg had to train day-in-day-out to mimic the fighting style of Ward and keep the body necessary for a believable boxer.

Director David O Russel actually took a fairly unusual approach to the boxing sequences and shot them in video. Making them seem more immediate and emulate the look of television. I don’t know if it has been done before, but I’m convinced it added to the veracity of the film.

All-in-all cool stuff. It was a fucking awesome year in movies. I was disappointed by True Grit, but pleasantly surprised by The Fighter. It was entertaining for the whole two hours and I was sad the movie was ending.

Cool.

A/5

-Collin

By Collin, on December 28th, 2010

#4 We just watched this on Netflix streaming. You should too!

Man on Wire


The Film: Man on Wire

Man on Wire isn’t perfect, but it is damn good. It follows a man who walked across a metal wire between the World Trade Center towers in the seventies.

It is really cool to hear the story, but the film feels a biiiit long. Also, the reenactments are kind of silly and there is actually no close-up footage of the man going across. Too bad.

Why to watch it: The act itself is amazing.

Something so absurd deserves to be seen. Philippe Petit, the hire-wire walker, is a truly unique man and his talent and passion is invigorating.

Pay attention to this: Philippe Petit’s focus while on the wire.

Great men and women have a level of focus and dedication that are hard to explain to us mere mortals. To commit oneself to something so powerfully, with all one’s soul and body, it not easy.

Nothing of the sort will ever be done again, but I can’t help but feel a better analysis of the man could have been done by someone like Werner Herzog. This is Herzog’s world. The film is great despite its “heist” elements….you’ll know what I mean.

Watch this right now when you get home from work or school or whatever it is you’re doing….you should be watching this instead.

And if you don’t have Netflix streaming….buy it. It costs the same as a shot and a beer at your local bar.

By Collin, on December 23rd, 2010

Tron Legacy

Is this one the best soundtracks ever made? I really think it might be.

Never before has a soundtrack fit so well with the visuals of a film. Daft Punk, two of the greatest and most influential artists in electronic music, have put together one of the great soundtracks in modern movies.

I say this not as hyperbole, but to highlight the importance of the soundtrack to the film. It is almost a music video simliar to the music group’s film Interstella 5555.  Roger Ebert opined, “It might not be safe to play this soundtrack in the car”. This is so true. Few action films are audacious even to warrant the veracity of Daft Punk’s soundtrack.

Daft Punk makes a cool cameo, it is funny that they fit in so well in their own real life stage costumes.

The visuals might be even better than the music. I’ve never been as shocked by the use of 3-D or computer graphics as I was when I saw this. Sure, Avatar was kind of cool……but it felt fake to me. Cartoon-like even. This is a whole other ball game.

The three dimension effect has never looked better and is put to fantastic use.

When inside The Grid. Nothing has ever looked even close to this good.

The speed, textures, lights, computer graphics, the grid’s architecture, the use of lines and 3-d combined to establish real depth, is some of the best looking stuff I’ve ever seen.

So why is this movie not the best I’ve ever seen? The story takes it from being a classic, to just a very, very good movie.

It is one film that we’ll throw on our new 3-D TVS in the future and watch cool sequences. We’ll rarely watch the entire movie.

The story was fucking weird and it didn’t need to be. It could have been simple and fun. Us vs Them. But instead, the writers decided to implement a weird story where Jeff Bridges has an evil avatar that hasn’t aged but his own character Flynn, has aged inside The Grid.

Why has Flynn aged when the other characters have not? To have Jeff Bridges in the film I suppose.

Then why not simply make the avatar old as well? If they can do anything they want, wouldn’t the Avatar change himself into an aged version as well? Why not a Dr. Manhattan type or big scorpion monster.

The addition of CGIed Bridges was distracting and didn’t look convincing. We know the actor. We can see the CGI. It looks bad and was stupid.

And what the fuck are ISOs? I gathered they were algorithms manifested as beings and gave myself a great deal of credit for that. I’m mildly educated in such things and still was dumbfounded. What about people who don’t believe in evolution and or something like that? What are they going to think of ISOs or “Isomorphic Algorithms” as google tells me.

Knowing that most people are stupid, I’m including myself here, is not an excuse to make your film stupid. But give people a chance to understand the narrative. This isn’t a David Lynch film.

How is the character Quorra, an ISO, going to change the world if she gets out? What are scientists to gleam about a digital being who was able to manifest in reality? All these questions are up in the air. This would have allowed the audience to care if she got out.

My brother explained: “Well, we’ll find out later…”

Not enough for me. Bad, lazy writing. If someone had stepped up and just made the story more simplistic and traditional it would have been a classic. The director Joseph Kosinski is, indeed, not a storyteller. Instead, he comes from a graphic design/architectural background. This design is legendary, but he should have known the story was bogus.

It remains a fantastic film, but it could have been legendary.

B+/5

-Collin

By Collin, on December 23rd, 2010

#3 We just watched this on Netflix streaming. You should too!

Sin Nombre


In this new series of articles we’ll be recommending random or popular films that are available right now on Netflix streaming. Join in and watch. Comment and email.

The Film: Sin Nombre

This is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It ranks with some of my favorite films of all time and in terms of the “crime genre” ranks only with City of God and Mean Streets. It makes the characters in Goodfellas look civilized and in considering its director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, I’m dazed at how a thirty year old could make such a mature film.

The film follows a gangster, El Casper, as he tries desperately to separate from his gang in Mexico. In a parallel story a young women Sayra is trying to get through Mexico to New Jersey. They both end up on a train together headed to America.

Why to watch it: Not only is it fantastic social commentary, it is fantastic entertainment

Few people can walk the line of social commentary with sex, violence, and action in it. Not many people can pull it off – almost no one can do it well. Oliver Stone, the master, is the only one that comes to mind who is consistent with this.

Fukunaga walks the line of action thriller and devastating social commentary. Not all illegal immigrants deal with anything even close to this film, but all of them risk a great deal to get to the United States and many other countries where they believe they can lead a better life. The immigrant situation is a complicated one…

Pay attention to this: The visceral experience.

Nothing in this film seems to be contrived. It is not “documentary-style”. A term that is used WAY too much these days. The original Office is documentary style. The compositions in this film are deliberate, but organic.

I choose to call it an observant style more than anything. Fukunaga observes the inner workings of Mexican gangs as if he’d been there so many times himself. He observes the intricacies of riding the trains through Mexico as if he’d rode them himself (maybe he has). This is not a movie that masturbates the gangster lifestyle or illegal immigration, but observes it with sympathy and understainding.

Watch this right now when you get home from work or school or whatever it is you’re doing….you should be watching this instead.

And if you don’t have Netflix streaming….buy it. It costs the same as a shot and a beer at your local bar.

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