Xard wrote:My comment was about the silly ending "DUN DUN DUNNNN OR IS IT" shot overall which just is kinda...there.

Yeah. I agree. I'm not sure how it could have been handled better or anything. I guess episodic TV series like Twilight can get away with quick and short "questioning" ending that is just "kinda there" because they're under an hour long. But to have a 2.5 hour movie become defined by a 15-second shot at the end that questions everything may be another thing.

If anything it made it more fun for me on the re-watch. I started picking things up that would have me define the ending differently each time. I've seen the movie 4 times and each time I came to a different conclusion.

I exposed two more people to Love Exposure last night. Doing my best to spread this film around like the plague.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:I'm not making this up, though you'd probably want to verify this yourself anyway.

Might Ruin the Magic  SPOILER: Show

Nolan got his crew to build a rig to spin around an airplane fuselage. Then they built the hall way set into that fuselage and fixed it lights to the fuselage so they could light the interior. They bolt the camera to the floor of the hall way and choreographed the actors fighting as they would turn the fuselage. And since the camera was fixed to the ground, and the lights to the fuselage, all the camera would pick up were bodies falling onto the ceiling and gripping onto the walls without any of the shadows moving around. Genius! Absolute genius!

Errr, so basically what I said? Yeah, many other films have used this technique for different purpose. I remember seeing a Making Of documentary once on one such film (I forget which). Watching them do it is arguably even cooler than the final result.

Aoyama's An Obsession: Part two of my Aoyama weekend. Worse than Wild Life, but not bad. Only mediocre and very lolDEEP.

I think he really hit the mark with Eureka. Probably one of my favorite films. Also, I have a soft spot for My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

schismatics wrote:Eastwood's manliness is more along the lines "outsider who doesn't talk much with dark past here to kick ass". Or at least that's how it is in most of his movies post-Man With No Name trilogy (his past is never really hinted at in those movies he's just...there).

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and For a Few Dollars More aren't really about the Man with No Name: particularly in FFDM he's incidental, stopping through the movie to kill a few people and make a shit-ton of money and then leave without ever really giving a shit about Mortimer and Indio, whereas in GBU he's the bored God to Tuco's childishly vengeful Man. Only A Fistful of Dollars is actually about [s]Sanjuro[/s] Eastwood's character, and there is subtle and not-so-subtle exposition on who he is in AFD (although to be honest it's underwhelming enough that I prefer to believe he's just making it up).

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Errr, so basically what I said?

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know you already covered it.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know you already covered it.

No biggie. What are some other films that have done this? Like I said, I know I've read about it and seen it before, but I'm blanking on the actual films that did it. It's a pretty old device, I think.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:No biggie. What are some other films that have done this? Like I said, I know I've read about it and seen it before, but I'm blanking on the actual films that did it. It's a pretty old device, I think.

2001 for sure, but other other than that, nothing's really coming to mind.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:No biggie. What are some other films that have done this? Like I said, I know I've read about it and seen it before, but I'm blanking on the actual films that did it. It's a pretty old device, I think.

Um... I can't think of any specific films at the moment. I just know I've seen that technique before. Matrix Revolutions may have had something like that in one of their fight scenes. There were supposed to be some weird programs that ran around on the walls and ceiling. It was kinda cool to watch, but didn't make sense within the Matrix universe.

Oh! And Singing in the Rain used it for the Make Them Laugh musical number. I haven't seen that movie sine I was at least 6 years old.

@schismatics: I forgot about those shots. I think some of those shots were more complicated forms of that technique than anything else I've seen. Especially toward the end.

I wish I could recall what film it was that I saw the making of documentary where they actually showed this process from the construction to the filming. It's quite fascinating to watch, because how it's done seems to have nothing to do with how it comes out on screen (I mean, it does logically, but not in a physical/psychological sense, if that makes, err, sense).

Army of Shadows. One of my favorite movies ever and one that gets better every time I see it. Now I have some special features to get through.

Bomby von Bombsville wrote:I exposed two more people to Love Exposure last night. Doing my best to spread this film around like the plague.

Excellent.

backseatjesus wrote:I think he really hit the mark with Eureka. Probably one of my favorite films. Also, I have a soft spot for My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Eureka is also one of my favorite films of all time, but I have yet to see My God. I'm planning on buying it on DVD this year (it's ridiculously expensive though, way over 6000 yen if my memory doesn't fail me).

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And here are the statistics after 2 months:

10 views

The Social Network

9 views

Black Swan
Inception

5 views

Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (all versions)
How To Train Your Dragon
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

4 views

Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (all versions)
The King's Speech

Holding to my word, here is my films I've watched list for February 2011. Most of them are flicks I saw in Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

February '11 List wrote:9.0/10 The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
1.0/10 The Crawling Eye (1958) (as it appeared in Mystery Science Theatre 3000)
0.5/10 The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (1959) (as it appeared in Mystery Science Theatre 3000)
9.0/10 Fight Club (1999) (watched 04/02/11)
0.5/10 The Mad Monster (1942) (as it appeared in Mystery Science Theatre 3000)
1.0/10 Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966) (as it appeared in Mystery Science Theatre 3000)
8.0/10 Great Expectations (1946) (watched 10/02/11)
0.5/10 The Corpse Vanishes (1942) (as it appeared in Mystery Science Theatre 3000)
6.5/10 Caddyshack (1980)
6.5/10 Sense and Sensibility (1995)
0.5/10 Robot Monster (1953) (as it appeared in Mystery Science Theatre 3000)
4.0/10 Team America (2004)

Comments/Notes
- I really enjoyed the original The Day the Earth Stood Still - its melancholy yet effective direction and layers of meaning (that is to say, narrative messages and their meanings) held my interest throughout.
- Fight Club is a supurb piece of cinema. In my film diary I've noted it as 10/10 based on the fact that I couldn't think of any flaws with it at the time, since then, I've realised that the book left me with more to think about than the film did, and it communicated its ideas better in that medium.
- I thoroughly enjoyed David Lean's Great Expectations, I find it hard to think that anyone else should not.
- I have mixed feelings for Sense and Sensibility - I found the first forty minutes to be utterly unengaging and was frustrated with both the narrative presentation and the 'Basic Camera Techniques 101' cinematography. The rest of the film picked up a bit and proved to be enjoyable.
- I'm halfway through Mystery Science Theatre 3000 season one and it's proving to be a fun show, but it doesn't change the fact that the movies they are watching are awful.
- I hadn't seen Team America since it first came out. I like the way the film was produced, however, I don't like the way it was written. Scenes and jokes fall flat too often, and the only character worth caring about besides the lead is a lazy but clever re-write of Eric Cartman from South Park. Actually, material from that show is re-used thoroughout this film, including an alternate version of the infamous 'Montage' song... in the end, Team America isn't as funny as its creators would hope, and their messages are among the worthless they have ever tried to communicate.

So I didn't see many good movies. I'll be taking a break from MST3K so I can watch some films that I'd set aside for Feburary. They are, in alphabetical order:

Adaptation. (2002)
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Dr Zhivago (1965) (re-watch)
I Was Born, But ... (1932)
La Strada (1954)
Malcolm X (1992)
Persepolis (2007) (re-watch)
Platoon (1986)
The 39 Steps (1935)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Up in the Air (2009)

So yeah, I'll see about setting aside some time to watch those.

EvangelionFan wrote:Adaptation. (2002)
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Dr Zhivago (1965) (re-watch)
I Was Born, But ... (1932)
La Strada (1954)
Malcolm X (1992)
Persepolis (2007) (re-watch)
Platoon (1986)
The 39 Steps (1935)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Up in the Air (2009)

Some great films here. I guess I enjoyed Sense & Sensibility more than you did. It helps that Emily Thompson and Kate Winslet are two of my favorite actresses and that Ang Lee is a terribly underrated director.

Oz wrote:The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

Wow wow wow hang on a sec. Our beloved Haruhi's christams adventure is avalable on DVD already?

Dark doom wrote:avalable on DVD already?

Came out on the 18th of December last ... in Japan.

Aoyama's EM Embalming: Aoyama does body horror. Mixed with musings on death and meaning of life. Not completely convinced it's a masterpiece after the first view, but it's certainly the best film out of Artsmagic's Aoyama box.

Benny Chan's Shaolin was an enjoyable martial arts film with Buddhist elements. Once again, it's the post-Crouching Tiger style of martial arts films that has a super-Westernized score and lacks much of the "we're having fun" atmosphere of the old-school kung fu flicks. This might be the best we can get nowadays, but I wouldn't mind seeing better.