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I tried to get a discussion going about two quite good RECENT movies, House of Sand and Fog and Cold Mountain, and only one response to each post!
Posts about movies with long dead actors, directors, etc. get gazillion answers.
This is, I believe, a version of "they don't make music like they used to" over on Rocky Road.
C'mon, dinosaurs, get out of your damned living rooms and join the human race: art should NOT be exclusively a lone activity...it is SOCIAL.
Secondly, if you look down your collective noses at contemporary film, and boycott the indies as well as mainstream, you are abandoning the medium to the lowest common denominator.
You want less car chases, gratuitous violence (Jeez, I hope so, anyway...)? Well, try patronizing the producers who're taking a risk bringing you exactly that. (Rant over...)
Follow Ups:
..I saw Jane Campion's 'In The Cut' last week and was very impressed, especially with the level of acting (Mark Ruffalo). And really good second roles for Jennifer Jason Leigh & Kevin Bacon.
I'm gonna be watching out for Ruffalo who, IMHO, out Brando'd Brando!!
especially the clever use of the color Red throughout; I do make it a point to avoid B. Kingsley movies, however, even if Jen Con is in them...
My wife and I used to go to the movies once a week, maybe more.A couple of years ago, we went to go see the first Harry Potter movie. It was friday and she got off work a little early so we were able to catch the 4:30 discount show. It was a cold mid-December day and the hall was virtually empty, maybe 6 people total. We plopped down right in the sweet spot commenting that it would be nice if they turned the heaters on at least.
We sat through this far too long and not terribly interesting childrens film. My wife never got warm even with my arm around her and her coat draped over her. As we stood to leave, a grimace crossed her face. She touched the back of her right thigh . . . "what's this? . . . it's wet?" She turned around and I saw that the right thigh of her jeans was shiny. No wonder she never got warm. After touching it, she smelled her fingers to see if it was Coke or coffee or what. To her horror, it was pee. From her hip to her knee, it was soaked through. She sat in it for 3 hours . . .
Some kid had peed on the seat during the afternoon matinee. 3 hour movie, exciting and scary (for a little kid) climax combined with those 55 Gallon sodas they sell, it's inevitable stuff like this happens.
Well, in the 25+ years I've known her, I've never seen her more pissed off than when we were driving home with her pants around her ankles. She was just insane with outrage. She can laugh about it now (sorta) but she vented her spleen at the corporate offices of the theater chain (Century) the next day and received about $60 worth of free passes.
This episode (and a flurry of cell phone jabberers and blown speakers, broken seats and farters at about the same time) gave us the impetous to buy a big screen HD HT system. We still go to the movies, but it's much less often now.
I have every intention of seeing those 2 movies, but will watch them from the warm and dry sofa at home.
Saw "Confidence" last night. Highly entertaining quadruple-cross grifter movie. Colorfully shot and directed by James Foley (GlennGarry, At Close Range) and populated by entertaining overactors (Dustin Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Rachel Weisz, Ed Burns, Andy Garcia) spouting hardboiled dialoge. A very entertaining 2003 film.
n
What I'd miss would be the crowd reaction, the sense of communal viewing, camaraderie---the shared experience.
And viewing "Cold Mountain" at home will NOT be the same. It is a BIG SCREEN experience.
As I said, the pee escapade happened amid a flurry of other bad cinema experiences. We were fed up. It was time.While I understand the communal movie going experience, especially for comedies, communal also means people talking, eating, farting and text messaging. Crowd reaction can also mean some over-medicated geriatric sitting behind you repeatedly barking "What did he say?" or a pack of 1st gen immigrants having the entire movie translated to them by their kids. What I'm trying to say is you have to take the good with the bad. I'd rather not.
And viewing Cold Mountain on a 51" HD TV from a state-of-the-art DVD in a small room is quite the big screen experience. That TV fills my field of vision better than the screens in many shoe-box sized theaters these days. My speakers aren't too loud, too soft and they aren't blown. I've watched a lot of "big screen only" movies on this system and it's been terriffic. Friends coming over to watch have the same reaction too.
We still go to movies. Sometimes several times a month, depending on the season and what's out there, but not nearly to the degree we used to.
Theaters here have begun selling Taco Bell products, so now added to the sensual mix of popcorn, coke, body odor, and pee evidently, is the stench of Taco Bell, not to mention the accompanying sound of wrappers rustling and fat folks breathing laboriously through their nostrils while their piehole is gorged with half a bean burrito. Cell phones ringing and worse, idiots carrying on conversation is the height of egocentric behavior, like we all are on the edge of our seats over their mundane "he said she said" instead of the plot of the movie. Last but not least of insults are the offensive commercials we are now subjected to prior to the all too revealing trailers of upcoming attractions. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention bozo parents who bring whining tots (not their fault mind you) to see horror films, or even worse, films with frontal nudity and sex etc. Other than those minor nuisances, Movie theaters are just fab. Most times I'll wait for the DVD. We attend maybe two movie showings per year. You can have it.
n
...that there are several dozen aspiring videophiles out there trying to figure out how to manipulate their wives into that special "On Golden Pond" seat at this very moment! :o)BTW, we like our HT system as well and still regularly go out to see films in the cinema.
Cheers,
AuPh
Here's the Onion review, which pretty well sums up my feelings:Featuring more fog machines than an Andrew Lloyd Webber touring company, Vadim Perelman's House Of Sand And Fog clogs its Bay Area exteriors with billowing plumes of backlit smoke. For Perelman, a commercial director making his feature debut, this recurring atmospheric touch suffocates the screen in portent, elevating a petty real-estate dispute to the grim heights of modern Greek tragedy. But viewers may take it as a travel advisory: After miles of driving through pea soup, it finally comes time to pull off the road. Adapted from Andre Dubus III's novel, the story turns on an absurd bureaucratic fillip, but Perelman barely allows a second of levity or irony to puncture his airless, fussed-over frames. Despite a trio of thoughtful, full-bodied performances by Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly, and Shohreh Aghdashloo, the film wears its seriousness like a wet blanket; even before the ludicrous finale, it becomes maddeningly difficult to get out from under it. Still reeling from a broken marriage and a bout with addiction, Connelly loses her ranch-style home near the ocean a mere six months after inheriting it from her father. By any reasonable standard, the circumstances surrounding her eviction are grossly unfair, revolving around a neglected $500 tax notice for which she wasn't responsible in the first place. But as soon as the county sets it up for auction, the property is snapped up by Kingsley, an exiled Iranian colonel who scraped together the down payment from humbling stints as a road worker and a convenience-store clerk. The state offers to buy the place back from Kingsley, but he intends to sell it at four times the price in order to reclaim aristocratic life with his wife Aghdashloo and his young son. Meanwhile, Connelly finds a dangerous advocate in Ron Eldard, a married police deputy who takes the displaced woman under his wing and tries more underhanded tactics to seize her house back. Both Connelly and Kingsley have equal claim on the property, and it's to the film's credit that it holds both in equal regard, holding their virtues and flaws in careful balance. But they're ultimately reduced to players in a heavily symbolic and agonizingly deterministic treatise on America itself, with the house at the center of an ongoing epic struggle between natives and immigrants. Under the freight of all this significance—aggravated by Perelman's moody visuals and James Horner's prodding piano score—House Of Sand And Fog folds like a house of cards, collapsing under its own flimsy foundation. —Scott Tobias
----------------------------------I thought I had something specific to add to that, but re-reading it, it's pretty comprehensive. It's the most humorless film I can remember seeing. And I understand that it's a (melo)drama, but come on, people still joke around. 'A Simple Plan,' which was a much better movie, still had its moments of levity, and proceeded in a similar mien to HoSaF.
My friend and I were left with the impression that the moral of the movie is that you should check your mail. And that the whole thing comes unravelled, obviously, because of the dipshit corrupt cop, and not because of the principal players, who seem like they might've eventually worked something out. But the implausibility of the cop character is...implausible. Several of the most important plot points were simply untenable, and I didn't really care for any of the characters. I thought the performances were mostly good, but that ultimately didn't count for much.
I'm not adding much to the Onion review. But I figured this would at least get a discussion going...?
_____________________________"What is this, a freak-out?"
- Violet Beauregard
of the Shah.
Not a great movie, of course, but Kingsley is always entertaining, if a bit ingratiatingly intense. At any rate, definitely worth a watching...
Kingsley was the most intense, verbally violent men I have witnessed on screen. He was incredibly overpowering and malevolent.If you think you don't like him--you'll hate him after this one.
Couldn't believe how "malevolent" Gandhi had become and had to see it again!
Your post makes a point.
I will make it short.
First I do believe that at the moment the best films belong to the past. As only commercial films have a chance to get big distributions, look at France a very bad year for them! Only big US are selling. The small one are non existent.
The social aspect on tht I did wrote shortly on this forum, you are right.
But old dinosaurs.PS: The US films comes to Europe later.
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