Serious Movie Discussion

[Kulus]

Originally Posted by Bullitt68

The wrestler. RIP.

That was a stirring movie who's the RIP for?

[HH]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Needles

Top Gun was on again last night. gets better every time i watch it. love every part

Agreed. I love it.

And the score is seriously fucking great.

[JSN]

Originally Posted by Kulus

That was a stirring movie who's the RIP for?

no, he's talking about the brother from that docu who died was a wrassler IRL. dude was a fucked up guy.

that must have been hell on the family knowing that this dude was going to pass away young due to his failings as a human being. i know a couple like that. their daughter is a severe anorexic and has been since she was like 13 and it seems like they've pretty much accepted the fact that she will most likely die soon.


it would be interesting to see someone else do a docu on that family. i do think his thesis is interesting, but if you look at how unflattering the movie is to the two brothers who weren't making it, you have to come away with thinking chris bell probably has some significant warts that we didn't see, and that the family had some issues that simply weren't touched on.


this is coming from a former steroid user who has no problems with rec or competition use- these guys were still fucked up. and this whole powerlifting subculture as led by louis siimmons is analogous to a ring of sexual deviants online IMO.

you get a bunch of people together with some kind of negative pathological obsession, and then they all start reinforcing their narcissistic fantasy world, where it's okay to lie to the people you love and push the type of doses of steroids that lead to cardiac events, because oh yeah it's important to push as much weight as you can in an absolutely ridiculous sport that offers no positive returns other than individual satisfaction.

[redjako]

Originally Posted by Bullitt68

I know discussing the realism of a film about alien robots is beyond stupid, but all the same, whenever I watch any of the robot fights, I always end up wondering how come none of the transformers ever step on the people running around at their feet.

How Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox have yet to be trampled amid all of the chaotic robot throwdowns is nothing short of miraculous.

The Robots should be stepping on the softie humans, though it took me about 30 seconds of thought to consolidate the fact that the robots just don't release swarms of 1 billion smaller bots to murder everyone...because they built themselves to fight other robots

[Three Gun Fish]

PUBLIC ENEMIES


Michael Mann. How I love thee. It's like how I felt about Soderbergh after OUT OF SIGHT, THE LIMEY, OCEANS 11, and TRAFFIC. A block of solid flicks all dripping with style and robust expertise.

I was worried how Mann's contemporary immediate style would mesh with a period genre. I shouldn't have been. It's a gorgeous film, paced well, and visually interesting at all times. Mann has seamlessly interwoven special/visual effects, creating a new standard of movie wounds. He control over sound during gunfights is still topnotch. He also picked scores of beautiful faces to capture.

Depp disappeared in a role without gimmicks or quirks. Bale carried his part well. Marion Cotillard reminded how much I used to love Meg Ryan as a kid. Christian Bale carried his trademark demeanor acting perfectly as a man trying to do a job he hates.

I really loved it. It felt fresh and timeless. It never wavered or wandered. It was stamped that Mann imprimatur. It felt authentic.

[heavyarms21]

transformers left a little of a bad taste in my mouth because it wasn't the action movie I thought it could be, but Public Enemies didn't make it two bad weeks in a row, I loved the movie I thought Bale was good, and I really liked Depp's performance, great movie.

[Bullitt68]

I just spent some time in the Heavyweights. Now I know trying to get through to the majority of the posters there with stuff as anomalous as reason and logic borders on the futile, but I'm proud to say that I tried for a solid two hours.

I haven't spent that much time in the HW's for months, so the fact that I just spent that much time there consecutively means that I don't have to go back for, oh, two or three years.

I wonder how long it'll be before the headache subsides. . .

Originally Posted by Three Gun Fish

It's a gorgeous film, paced well, and visually interesting at all times.

I agree about the pacing but "gorgeous" and "visually interesting" is not the way I'd describe the relentlessly shaky imagery and the too-zoomed-in shootouts.

Strangely, any time they were in a wooded area, the locations were great and Mann was having the film shot as if he had a real cinematographer on the payroll and not a YouTuber, but for the rest of the time, there was too much unrelenting motion that A) Was very disorienting and B) Didn't match the tone and the pacing of the film.

Originally Posted by Three Gun Fish

Depp disappeared in a role without gimmicks or quirks.

Felt more to me like he never showed up. It's not all Depp's fault, though, since I found Mann's trademark character construction considerably lacking, especially in regards to the main character.

Originally Posted by Three Gun Fish

Marion Cotillard reminded how much I used to love Meg Ryan as a kid.

Agreed. She was the best part of the film IMO.

Originally Posted by Three Gun Fish

Christian Bale carried his trademark demeanor acting perfectly as a man trying to do a job he hates.

Agreed again. I'm not saying that Mann should've taken the focus off of Depp and transferred it to Bale, but I do think he should've focused more on Bale and his quest to apprehend Depp than on Depp's and Cotillard's relationship. He didn't have to make it quite as adversarial as the De Niro/Pacino face-off from Heat, but the entire film was almost devoid of that sense of cops-and-robbers and the gamesmanship that was prevalent during the Depression and that John Dillinger displayed throughout his criminal career. He was a 1930s thrill-seeking Robin Hood, but in Public Enemies, he was a strangely bland, uninteresting gangster I didn't really care all that much about.

Originally Posted by Three Gun Fish

It felt fresh and timeless. It never wavered or wandered. It was stamped that Mann imprimatur. It felt authentic.

You really loved this film. Top ten of the decade?

[HH]

I just spent some time in the Heavyweights. Now I know trying to get through to the majority of the posters there with stuff as anomalous as reason and logic borders on the futile, but I'm proud to say that I tried for a solid two hours.

I haven't spent that much time in the HW's for months, so the fact that I just spent that much time there consecutively means that I don't have to go back for, oh, two or three years.

I saw you fight the dorkness (is this a word?) today in the HWs.
I was amused.

[BayAreaGuy]

RE: Public Enemies


Looks like at the premiere in Chicago, lots of people didn't like it, even many of the extras in the movie.

Public Enemies: Not quite money in the bank - Isthmus | The Daily Page

Man, you should have seen that party. Tuesday evening at the downtown Hilton, revelers celebrating the premiere of Public Enemies wore 1930s clothes and laughed and clinked cocktail glasses. Outside the fete, which benefited Film Wisconsin and Arts Wisconsin, passersby ogled beautiful vintage cars, on one of which a guy wearing spats leaned cinematically.

A little later, at Point Cinemas before the screening, the mood was giddy. Inspiring speeches were given, and audience members who'd worked as extras in the film stood for applause. The lights dimmed. There was clapping at the sight of the Universal Studios logo. After all the excitement, the buildup, the political wrangling that gripped Wisconsin, where much of Public Enemies was filmed, the movie was beginning. And 140 minutes later...

There was polite applause.

The corridor was strangely hushed as moviegoers filed out. Hushed, that is, except for one exchange I overheard. One stranger asked another, "Did you like it?" The reply: "No!"

My reaction to the film isn't quite as abruptly dismissive as that man's. There is much about it that I like, in fact, and what I like most is the performance by Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, the Indiana farmboy who, in the early 1930s, vexed law enforcement officials and became an American folk hero as he committed a spectacular series of heists.

Darkly handsome Depp is one of our most interesting Hollywood changelings, and what's remarkable about his sometimes-rabid fan cult is its sheer ecumenism. He was a teen idol in the 1980s, when he starred on 21 Jump Street and was turned into soup by Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare On Elm Street. All these years later he's still a teen idol because of his work in special-effects blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. (He also now stars in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean theme-park ride, and it's a more compelling performance than you might expect.)

But he also retains cachet with the arugula-eating set, thanks to his fascinating performances in a series of challenging smaller films, many directed by quirkmeister Tim Burton. Depp was somber and tragic as Edward Scissorhands, obsessive and wild-eyed as Ed Wood, smug and menacing as Willy Wonka. And Depp even emerged as a plausible musical-comedy performer in Sweeney Todd, which saw him bring a rock 'n' roll singer's technique to Stephen Sondheim's tricky libretto, with satisfying results.

As it happens, Depp does a little singing during my favorite scene in Public Enemies. Dillinger has just busted out of jail and taken a couple of anxious hostages on the lam with him. In a cute if jarring gesture, he tries to ease the tension by crooning a few bars of "The Last Roundup." Someone like Dennis Hopper might have played this for menacing camp, but Dillinger really does seem to like singing the song, and his captives do seem to relax a little.

Scenes like that shed important light on why Dillinger was, and remains, an important American celebrity. Among criminals he was a charmer, a lovable scamp — if also a violent, ruthless one. In one of the film's spectacular bank-robbery scenes, Dillinger quietly refuses, in the name of populism, to take a bank customer's money, then engages in a brutal shootout with police.

A better — and shorter, and more vividly dramatic — film would focus more on searing moments like those. But Public Enemies is rambling and, dare I say, a little dull. Director and writer Michael Mann, along with screenwriters Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, have not effectively distilled their source material, Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies, a sprawling, lavishly entertaining portrait not merely of Dillinger, but of a 1930s crime wave also perpetrated by the likes of the Barker gang and Bonnie and Clyde.

True, Mann and his designers have marvelously captured the book's 1930s setting, down to the Zenith radios, the neon signs, the running boards on the cars that everyone seems to prefer riding on. And the Wisconsin locations look great, especially the scenes filmed outside the state Capitol, with the stately old Pinckney Street buildings in the background. (During one scene, I heard whispers around me as people excitedly identified tidy Columbus, Wis.)

But even as Mann zooms in on Dillinger, his moll Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the FBI agent pursuing them, the director preserves more of the book's epic sweep than he really needs. Thanks partly to the film's muted color palette and often dim lighting, the enormous cast of stars and extras too often is an indistinguishable parade of men in dark suits, police officials and criminals alike.

Also making the characters hard to tell apart: Many performers, including Depp, uniformly spit out their sometimes clichéd lines in that clipped tough-guy cadence that probably seemed hackneyed not long after James Cagney used it in 1931's The Public Enemy. True, Bale's Melvin Purvis speaks in more deliberate tones, and it's a fine, subdued performance — though Purvis never really emerges as more than a cipher, despite ample screen time.

And there is too much action at the margins. A thread involving the increasingly anxious Chicago mobster Frank Nitti (Bill Camp) is vague. And a more crucial subplot, about the emergence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), never really gels. Crudup brings bravura fussiness to the role, which has him wrangling with legislators, feeding gossip to newspaper writers and holding quietly tense conversations on one of the many telephones covering his desk. But other than a few hurried exchanges about the federal government's expanding law-enforcement jurisdiction, it never becomes vitally clear what was at stake for Hoover.

Burrough made it perfectly clear in his book, whose subtitle is America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Then again, Burrough had 592 pages to make it clear.

I was really excited about this, now I'm not sure if I"m going to see it, lots of people say it's boring.

[HH]

Watching Angels and Demons. Thought it would be a great hangover movie, but it really isn't.