When I watch films, I look at the following in careful details: production design, editing, writing.
Yea, that's my problem now, if you add direction to the list. I have always been incredibly critical of films. Even films I like I can't help but consider. I may not even try to, but all the critical cocmments, both good and bad just appear in my head, and I tend to end up talking to people about it.
It's not helped by the fact a lot of it is spent talking to this friend who is a director, and who I write screenplays and music for, so we really did manage to make a critical analysis of the first forty minutes of it no problem, and hence my noticing of direction more and more. We also decided that Switchblade Romance was really quite good, had some nice direction and such, but managed to, in editing, put an essential scene about five minutes before it should have happened. Totally killed the pacing and emotion of the ending!
I'm glad people seem to have fairly similar ideas of The Prestige's quality though, as everyone else has bene far more favourable (and apparently not really thought about it much).
I'm somewhat not surprised by your comments of The Fountain, V. I want to see it for the effects (as they're all practical - I read an interesting article about how they were done not long ago), but am not expecting to really like it. I saw the trailer for it when I was in Canada last year and it looked a bit... Lost and confused and like it was trying to be way too self important.
I figure it will be like Sin City, stunningly directed and designed, but otherwise terrible (though perhaps with BETTER ACTING... ungh)! And two more of them to come yet. I basically expect 300, despite all the technical achievments, to be another Sin City, although I have at least some hope that Snyder will turn out to be a more competent director at least, and that thusly the Watchmen might turn out being good. We shall see!
As for The Illusionist, from what I could tell, it was indeed the poor man's Prestige (despite what I think of that so far - though I will watch it a proper), but it looked like Ed Norton was totally underplaying it, when it was clearly his chance to chew the scenery for the hell of it! That and I think I hate Paul Giamatti after having seen Shit in the Water (that film in which he played a condo super, who waded out into the pool in the middle of the night to see something spooky, and pulled a small turd out of the pool and went back inside...). I guess it wasn't entirely his fault that that film actually had me laughing out loud at the ending. The emotional music built up, more Narfs and Snuggrunts or whatever the fuck they were all called had things happen, and three of us just burst into uncontrollable laughter, which at least made the movie more worthwhile than it otherwise would have been.
Shayamalan is such a fuck*ng hack, and yet I could see he was trying. Half the shots in it were really quite nicely thought out, the other half were obviously thought out but didn't work at all. And the writing was just off the charts bad!
Anyway, I go on...
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Topic: wombat tries to watch movies again (Read 99938 times)