for the record, I think every Wes Anderson movie is awesome.

Life Aquatic is proof that popular critics are completely untrustworthy. its moment-by-moment one of the funniest things i've ever seen. only movies i think are consistently funnier are Holy Grail, Life of Brian and Duck Soup. (that isn't to say its the fourth best comedy i've ever seen, all things considered, because certainly there is more to Chaplin for example than just laughs. just that in terms of pure lolz, those are the only three i laughed at more)

I think it's because Life Aquatic is one of those movies you need to see a second time. The Big Lebowski, The Fountain and Life Aquatic were not universally well liked by critics, but they are some of my favorite films of all time. Some films just take more than one viewing.

cough Fight Club

So some reps for a Warner Bros. program that sends free Blu-Rays to film bloggers contacted me and brought me in to be one of their initial set of bloggers, but after watching and tweeting and soon reviewing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close they might rescind that offer. What a towering piece of shit. Remember all those videos of people in the Middle East celebrating 9/11? Those were less offensive than this smug POS. A bunch of great actors (and a weird, awful kid) chained to the work of one of the worst authors in America. If there's an opposite to a pantheon, this movie's on it.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic about the whole rescinding of the offer, but I think after all the bad press the movie has had, I'm sure Warner Bros. won't mind another scathing review.

Also, just to piss you off a little more, those geniuses that reviewed Meek's Cutoff included EL&IC on their best-of lists.

The Lady Eve 2/5

I genuinely don't understand where people are coming from on this. I found it to be insufferably smug and tediously paced (how could anyone justify calling a film this slow screwball?). Stanwyck, Fonda and Demarest were good, though.

50/50
8.7/10

Midnight In Paris
8.8/10

Jane Eyre (2011)
8.6/10

Tree of Life
10/10

Alien (blu-ray) - 10/10

Watching it to get geekily-hyped for Prometheus. The shots are gorgeous. Blu-Ray makes it look like it was shot yesterday though it was made over 30 years ago. Ian Holm is fantastic (well, the whole cast really)
geekgeekgeekgeek

Yeah I was very disappointed with this film. I urge you not to give up on Preston Sturges, though. I almost did, but then I checked out The Palm Beach Story a few days ago and really loved it. So if you haven't seen that one, I recommend it.


Is this an improvement on first viewing? Or did you give it a perfect score first time as well? I seem to remember you didn't.

Finally got to watching Tokyo Story. Excellent film. My second favourite Ozu after Ohayo (Good Morning). I find the heartwrenching proprtions of Tokyo Story to be a little overrated, though. Am I alone in this? I find that life in Ozu's "melodramas" is represented too realistically for me to feel emotional involvement. I get much more emotional when films are of their own world, not of the real world. I can rationalise that too much. !!!spoilers ahead!!! Why exactly should the death of the old lady be such a sad thing? The woman was old, all the sorrow and regret among family members were not of any tragic proportions, and the old man realising his loneliness is only natural. Ozu does a brilliant job in presenting us with a slice of real life. But me being irl not a very emotional person prevents me from becoming emotionally involved in this film. I guess that's a compliment to Ozu's work? idk. Great film, regardless, and I will continue to watch Ozu movies and love them, methinks.

Being on the sublect of melodrama, I watched Ali: Fear Eats the Soul for the first time. Aside from a few problems with the script, I feel that Fassbinder does fantastic work here. I'm glad he decided to keep the film very colourful and carefully framed, as the original was. And even though the styles of Sirk and Fassbinder are vastly different from each other, they display a similar warmth in some scenes. I very much appreciated Fassbinder's choice to further problematise the two characters' place in society by substituting the forty-ish widow with a sixty-ish cleaning lady and substituting the ruggedly handsome heart throb gardener for an Arab immigrant worker. This makes the problems they are faced with slightly more believable than in All That Heaven Allows. However, I think Fassbinder was a little too ambitious in his attempt to problematise the relationship between Ali and Emmi by largening the age difference. Also, some of Emmi's scene's seemed not very believable to me. Why didn't she make couscous? She so would.
After this and World on a Wire, I will definitely be checking out more Fassbinder. Maybe I'll check out Berlin Alexanderplatz next. Shit's gotta be good, right?

Response to PBR:

I think what makes it so wrenchingly sad is precisely the lack of sorrow and regret of everyone except Noriko (hope I remembered her name—the one who married in) and the father (who also married in)—oh, and the younger daughter, I suppose, but the film undercuts that somewhat, I think. I find it tremendously powerful that the only two people who grieve substantially out of anything more than cultural expectation are the two people who chose to be a part of the family. If what the film did were simply portray the death and grief (even if in a brilliant way), I would accept your point. But the way that it portrays the lack of grief every bit as much, and does so in a sympathetic way, so that the other family members aren't just totally unlikeable, is what makes the film so moving. For instance, the youngest brother—he clearly begins pathetic, and then he has that one scene where he thinks to himself how he will improve. As the viewer, you (rationally) have to treat that with distrust—why should mere grief be a motivator like that? he has to convince me that it really means that much to him. etc.—and that distrust is later proven right. But it's not just distrust, it's distrust and hope, and in exploiting that, Ozu creates a moment that captures that profound disappointment when someone squanders a crucial opportunity to improve himself.

Not sure how cogent that is but hopefully it is at least somewhat compelling.

That film really does stand the test of time. The Nostromo still looks great after all of these years.

It just goes to show that scale models look better and hold up much longer than CGI does. They also have a lot more character because they're tangible.