wombat tries to watch movies again

[greenkoolayd]

Primer is one of the few movies (in fact basically the only movie) that I watched again immediately after it had finished. I really enjoyed it but puzzles in movies is something I tend to enjoy even if the rest of the movie is sub-par (though I don't think Primer was).
Some movies are difficult to follow because they are badly made, Primer is not one of those movies, the people who made it knew exactly what they were doing and I love them for it.
I accept my views are not universally held though.

a great movie.  i appreciate it even more because there is lots of talking and not so much karate or explosions or titties, but it is still entertaining and cool.

[Drygioni]

I watched Anvil! The Story of Anvil last night and enjoyed the hell out of it. 5 parts Spinal Tap, 1 part The Wrestler, it is a documentary about an old school Canadian metal band who never made it big despite heavily influencing Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax, etc. 30 years later and they are still at it, gearing up to record their 13th album.

The similarities to Spinal Tap are really uncanny. Fortunately the director doesn't use this as an opportunity to mock these guys but instead shows you the humanity of the band members. I would definitely recommend this even if you aren't into metal at all.

Absolutely fantastic film.

I'm not a metal fan but that doesn't even matter, they were fantastic guys and the film was superbly paced and made with real warmth. The ending was  life imitates art

WATCH IT

[greenkoolayd]

fantastic mr fox.  its way good.  it seems meant for 8 or 10 year olds, but you will dig it.

[KeithHernandez]

I watched Public Enemies yesterday and Hoop Dreams today.  Hell of Chicago.

Public Enemies was awful, Hoop Dreams is soo good.  You probably don't even need to like basketball (I kinda do), as long as you like getting a great picture of a time and a place.

[greenkoolayd]

Public Enemies was awful

i disagree, but it was other than cool or exceptional.

[Drygioni]

There are many times in a man's life when he realises that a one-time, universal yet life-changing occurrence crops up. It could be an epiphany, a moment of great realisation, where the events of the past and the direction of the future finally unmuddy themselves to provide crystal-clear guidance to the desperate or lost. Other times, it can be something as simple as the gut-wrenching moment you find that first grey hair in your sideburns or pubes. In this case, however, I have something far less welcome even than the grey pube; I have found what I believe to be my least favourite movie ever.

Ladies and gentlemen, that movie is Undisputed.

It sounds promising enough. Although the plot is simple, a seeming throwback to the early '90s (something that never bodes well for a film produced in 2002), it is pleasingly familiar, being a boxing-cum-prison drama where badboy world champion boxer George "Iceman" Chambers is sent to prison, whereupon friction with the current undefeated prison boxing champion Monroe Hutchen inevitably ensues. Easy enough, you may think, and all the ingredients are there for your classic underdog drama. World champion Iceman turns out to be an arrogant bully and thug, determined to beat seven shades of shit out of the slighter, mild-mannered (he even makes matchstick sculptures!) Hutchen in order to stamp his authority on the inmates he sees as beneath him; it is up to crowd favourite Hutchen to take him down a peg. The rest of the film only needs to flesh out the characters, get some tasty build-up scenes in, maybe a bit of prison violence, before culminating in a set-piece epic finish which is the true hallmark of a great boxing movie.

Unfortunately for my still-bleeding eyes, Undisputed fails on nearly every level as a film that is either interesting, entertaining or watchable. For starters, the characters possess the unenviable traits of being both instantly recognisable stereotypes and extremely hard to feel any kind of connection with. Iceman is so close to the vanilla 'Boxing Thug' it's tiresome; endlessly aggressive, remorselessly truculent, any layer of subtlety that would make the character a shade more interesting is lost in the constant angry shouting and violence that fills the screen upon his every appearance. The fact he is sent to prison for raping a woman could be the background for an interesting subplot, leaving the audience to judge whether or not he is in fact guilty, but it never progresses beyond him denying the charges in disgustingly macho style. Washington's Hutchen is no better, falling squarely into the category marked 'Badass Bookworm'; yet, far from possessing the full flavour of character such types often receive he is hardly developed at all beyond the aforementioned matchstick sculptures. Any sympathy or rooting-forness that the good guy in a boxing flick needs fails to materialise; the film makers seemed to decide that showing him doing something slightly arty and unexpected in a prison environment would be enough to establish him as an intelligent, float-like-a-butterly... type. Well, obviously they do to the extent that I can recognise it as a viewer, but I DON'T CARE as he remains extremely bland. Possessing neither the everyman-ness of a Rocky or the admirably hardcore good-guy-ness of a Gordon Freeman, his eventual big fight vs. his big rival leaves you caring very little.

The inmates of the prison are uniformly moronic, perpetuating the myths of the 'Code'/hive mind/actually not bad people! that every prison film embraces, and in this case we are shown no reason to either sympathise with their characters (some fairly ridiculous shows of heavy-handedness from the prison wardens are so unbelievable as to be insulting) or feel wonderment at their little behind-doors society. Good prison films (Shawshank Redemption) portray their jailbirds as essentially fallen humans, creating an interesting moral ambiguity within the viewer as they struggle with their simultaneously positive and negative feelings for what are often likeable characters. In Undisputed, they are either faceless, steroid-pumped loudmouths or ratty little wheeler-dealers who you consistently fail to notice as actually being important to the plot despite being in every scene, such is their relentless boringness.

The script is fuck*ng awful, frankly. I cannot remember a single line, but expect the usual diatribe about what it means to be a fighter etc. amongst perpetually stupid 'real prison talk'. I display more verbal gymnastics stabbing furiously at the keyboard after yet another night I fail to bring someone home and content myself with drunken postings on internet forums. The colours, cinematography and general niceness to view of the film all fail to achieve even basic competence, barely extending beyond monochrome prison colours and the directer, whoever he is, is not aware enough to exceed in this medium, as has been done before by many better films.

In short, it's shit shit shit, frankly I was shocked at the pathetic 1 hour 20 running time as it felt like 5 hours at only 20 minutes in. This lengthiness was by no means the result of plenty of content, how the film makers got more than 30 minutes out of their pathetic characters is a wonder, but the sheer mind-numbing crapulence of the viewing experience.

Andy, fuck you for making me watch it, film makers, your film is a cunt and you're a cunt, I hope wild hosss tear apart your film equipment.

Verdict, SHIT

Good day.

[wombat]

I am so glad that you saw this movie. Is that cruel?

[Drygioni]

I am so glad that you saw this movie. Is that cruel?

Depends.

What are your reasons for gladness?

[wombat]

Because I got to read that post. I know, only a couple moment's pleasure in return for your hour and a half of suffering, it's not really fair.

[Drygioni]

Because I got to read that post. I know, only a couple moment's pleasure in return for your hour and a half of suffering, it's not really fair.

I loved it really. Everyone loves complaining in needlessly florid tones

[Asherdan]

I loved it really. Everyone loves complaining in needlessly florid tones

Yeah, but I gotta say man, that was a good read on one helluva bad topic. Roses from a turd heap and all that.

[side_show]

I loved it really. Everyone loves complaining in needlessly florid tones

Well good.  Keep seeing shit movies and keep telling us about them.  Canned.

[Drygioni]

Before we begin, I am aware I have acquired something of a reputation recently for reviewing the rather less palatable members of the cinematic world. While the film I am about to review may well dwell within the realms of 'bad movies', it is a film I nonetheless feel a certain kind of fondness for; a blokey, amiable affection that allows me to enjoy it much like I would enjoy a destruction derby or act of violence on the football pitch. It's not clever, nor necessarily right to enjoy on an intellectual level, but it is loud, fun and makes the average male viewer wonder why he's wasting his life pushing buttons instead of beating the shit out of other males in interesting and satisfying ways.

Taken, then, might be called a guilty pleasure, and not without reason. Starring Liam Neeson in a rather unlikely role that he nonetheless plays very well, it is a straightforward badass-father-gets-revenge tale. When ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills' (pleasingly normal name for a protagonist) daughter gets kidnapped in Paris, it is up to him to cross the Atlantic and find her, all the while using a mix of violence, cunning and dubiously efficient technology to track her down.

The film begins well enough, giving Bryan and his daughter a fairly substantial back-story without getting too dull; part of the film's charm is that, considering the carnage that follows, a very real relationship is created between Bryan and his soon-to-be-nabbed child, making his plain mental rescue plan all the more believable. He's a sympathetic character you root for, a clearly loving man, yet nonetheless a complete badass, established in an early scene when he protects a singer from a crazed fan with what can only be termed extreme prejudice. Neeson is perfect for this role, his kind-hearted face tempered with a well-practiced steely gaze, not far from a slightly less irritatingly severe Jack Bauer. Sure, the actress playing her daughter doesn't quite seem to have the hang of basic human locomotion (watch her run. It's hilarious) and the rest of the cast are nothing special, but it doesn't matter, this is Neeson's movie; did you dislike Goldeneye because Sean Bean was less than convincing in it? Of course not, it was all about Brosnan anyway.

Anyway. Soon enough, Bryan's daughter is kidnapped, the action begins, and you'd better be ready for it, because that's all you'll be seeing for the next hour or so. I have seen a lot of action movies in my time, but none so relentlessly full of genuinely brilliant moments of violence, the kind that makes you laugh and cheer at the sheer badassery involved. Forget pin point accurate gun work or gymnastic scissor kicks, Bryan wins fights through sheer refined brutality. If there's a car door nearby, you can wager a head will be slammed by it. Fire extinguisher? Say goodbye to the bad guy's face. Seriously, the film is a masterpiece in the aestheticisation of violence, and as with all films of this ilk, it is not restricted to close combat, with car chases, gun fights and torture all crucial pieces of the savage jigsaw.

However, Taken differs somewhat from the typical action flick in certain ways. Firstly, although the protagonist has the usual casus belli in his favour somewhat justifying his relentless, bloody pursuit, what is not justified are certain acts of outright cruel revenge exacted upon his enemies. Although Rambo and Arnie always execute in cold blood the REALLY annoying bad guy, Bryan's actions can get uncomfortably homicidal at times. In one particularly hair-raising scene, he SHOOTS A GUY'S WIFE (who is completely oblivious to the developments of the story) without a trace of remorse (bar an actually quite funnily gruff 'please apologise to your wife for me') in order to get said guy to comply with his demands. In another scene, which is quite frankly astonishingly cruel... well, I'll not spoilt it, but let's just say he doesn't display the kind of moral decency your normal hero would. Whilst I would not go so far to say as this is an intelligent social commentary on the righteousness of revenge when family are involved and whether or not it is right to perpetrate certain acts for your own needs, more likely I would say the film is boldly stating the obvious: this guy has lost his daughter, and if you ended up in a similar situation, you'd do the same. Refreshing, perhaps, that a protagonist is portrayed so realistically; men can be furious, and men with a kidnapped daughter and some badass skills are especially dangerous when furious.

Beyond the asskicking, there is your usual tripe about that special bloke all heroes have who can tell them everything about anything whenever they want, sheer inefficiency of supposedly hardened criminal types when it comes to eliminating Bryan, basically all your usual James Bond tropes, but it all goes towards keeping the film ticking over in a suitably fast-paced fashion. Although many films employ the trick of ACTION ACTION ACTION to mask deficiencies in the plot or script, that doesn't really apply here as there is not much plot to deficiencise or script to rubbish; if anything, the script is quite well done in a limited kind of way, with Neeson happily avoiding delivering his lines with the cheesy sneer of a Bond, and any dialogue is much like the fighting: short, brusque, yet pleasingly efficient in achieving it's aims.

As you might have been able to tell, I loved this film. I make no apologies for the fact that violence, when done right, is one of the most entertaining things around. The story is really just an excuse for a succession of well-staged fights (and some quiet moments of badass espionage) and it's a firm favourite among my (unapologetically male) flatmates as well. It really owes more to a Jackie Chan film at their simplest (think Rumble In the Bronx); fighting man fights for personal reasons, with little in the film devoted to the tiresome Machiavellian exploits of a Bond villain, for example. In this sense, it is extremely non-boring, if not entirely satisfying on an intellectual level.

Admittedly, many of you will watch this film and hate it. At it's worst, it is dumb, brutal and unrealistic. However, if you appreciate a well-made action film with a likeable yet realistic protagonist and a good fight scene, you could do a lot worse.

7 thumbs up.

[Choop]

i think taken was liam neeson's way of saying "i'm glad they never asked me to be bond. he's kind of a pussy." B+ would watch again on hbo on a rainy saturday

[Drygioni]

Good god I made so many mistakes in that review. I must stop writing these at half 4 in the morning.

Choop that's spot on, Neeson is a god