A few films recently watched.

Primer 1/10. I'm fine with having to ponder a movie somewhat after viewing to figure it out, but after pondering this one for a bit I concluded "what a pretentious crock of shit." When the outstide of the box says "I wanted to rewatch it again right away," it seems like less of an endorsement of the film, and more like they were deliberately vague on the plot points in order to boost their bottom line with repeated viewings. I think I understood the general outline of events, but still. Seems like they were more intent on making their credits different from everyone else's (no white on black for us!) than on making a film that could be understood after one viewing. I don't want to have to get out a pad of paper and start drawing "time circles" on it to understand whose dupe is doing what at any given time.

That said, I actually do want to see it again, but I won't out of spite towards the filmmakers, lol.

portraying multiple timelines as one makes for some information overload i think, and that's why people rewatch

maybe he tried and failed but it looks like your rating is even out of spite

i thought primer was really impressive given the budget. there's some big flaws, the narration is annoying and some of the acting is stilted and awkward, but i think it deserves a high rating simply because of what was accomplished given the money he had. don't shit all over primer and then give transformers a pass or whatever.

  On 7/27/2009 at 1:46 AM, Adjective said:

portraying multiple timelines as one makes for some information overload i think, and that's why people rewatch

 

maybe he tried and failed but it looks like your rating is even out of spite

yeah, it is. I guess it'd be 6/10 for being stimulating, but it got on my tits that they took the time to make the credits look like a sharper image catalog, but didn't spend a bit more time on explication. Maybe I will rewatch it, I'm sure it'll just give me a big headache.

  On 7/26/2009 at 9:56 PM, olson said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 5:28 PM, The Overlook said:

Body of Lies - Well, I'm a sucker, admittedly, for the whole espionage / intelligence / counterintelligence type of film, especially when it concerns the middle east. I also love Ridley Scott, so I enjoyed this movie a lot.

 

I also think William Monahan is a very good writer.

 

you know whats better than that? body of evidence. man madonna was fuckin hot in that movie.

i agree but body of evidence was quite a bad movie, but it it still is superior to another downward spiral of a career left-over by the man formerly known as the great Ridley Scott.

Russel Crowe's fake georgian accent was too much on it's own to handle. And yes for those not in the know Inglorious bastards has also been ruined for me preemptively due to Bradd Pitt's attempts at Southern drawl. I also find it very hard to like any 'behind the scenes of the CIA' type of movie these days. Probably the last one i found remotely enjoyable was 'Enemy of the state' mostly because they portrayed the CIA as comic book like with Jack Black and Seth Green being the guys behind the computers

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:02 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 1:46 AM, Adjective said:

portraying multiple timelines as one makes for some information overload i think, and that's why people rewatch

 

maybe he tried and failed but it looks like your rating is even out of spite

 

yeah, it is. I guess it'd be 6/10 for being stimulating, but it got on my tits that they took the time to make the credits look like a sharper image catalog, but didn't spend a bit more time on explication. Maybe I will rewatch it, I'm sure it'll just give me a big headache.

it is a confusing movie but i think it's far less pretentious than a lot of other movies that are totally confusing but also have no explanation. What i appreciate about Primer is that it does have a very concrete and very follow-able plot if you watch it a few times, few other 'pretentious indie films' can make this claim.

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:04 AM, Awepittance said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 9:56 PM, olson said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 5:28 PM, The Overlook said:

Body of Lies - Well, I'm a sucker, admittedly, for the whole espionage / intelligence / counterintelligence type of film, especially when it concerns the middle east. I also love Ridley Scott, so I enjoyed this movie a lot.

 

I also think William Monahan is a very good writer.

 

you know whats better than that? body of evidence. man madonna was fuckin hot in that movie.

i agree but body of evidence was quite a bad movie, but it it still is superior to another downward spiral of a career left-over by the man formerly known as the great Ridley Scott.

Russel Crowe's fake georgian accent was too much on it's own to handle. And yes for those not in the know Inglorious bastards has also been ruined for me preemptively due to Bradd Pitt's attempts at Southern drawl. I also find it very hard to like any 'behind the scenes of the CIA' type of movie these days. Probably the last one i found remotely enjoyable was 'Enemy of the state' mostly because they portrayed the CIA as comic book like with Jack Black and Seth Green being the guys behind the computers

 

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:02 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 1:46 AM, Adjective said:

portraying multiple timelines as one makes for some information overload i think, and that's why people rewatch

 

maybe he tried and failed but it looks like your rating is even out of spite

 

yeah, it is. I guess it'd be 6/10 for being stimulating, but it got on my tits that they took the time to make the credits look like a sharper image catalog, but didn't spend a bit more time on explication. Maybe I will rewatch it, I'm sure it'll just give me a big headache.

 

it is a confusing movie but i think it's far less pretentious than a lot of other movies that are totally confusing but also have no explanation. What i appreciate about Primer is that it does have a very concrete and very follow-able plot if you watch it a few times, few other 'pretentious indie films' can make this claim.

ok, well I agree, if it does have a followable plot then it's not really pretentious. But seriously, did you figure it out all by yourself, or did you read some reviews? I think I got the overarching idea from watching it once - I did understand the part about their future selves being locked in the cupboard/attic, and the idea that there was some sort of tit-for-tat going on, but if I watch it again will I really understand the guy stalking them in the car? The takedown of the guy (one of the two of them?) in the alley, the earbleed, and the shotgun incident/love triangle? I wish they'd left out the shotgun thing (unless it was related to one of the other two guys on their team trying to get revenge for the two main characters running wild with their invention). It was 5 am and I was a bit drunk, and I make no claims to being particularly bright, but I did figure out the Prestige early on, Memento, etc. This one seems a bit more opaque...

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:22 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:04 AM, Awepittance said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 9:56 PM, olson said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 5:28 PM, The Overlook said:

Body of Lies - Well, I'm a sucker, admittedly, for the whole espionage / intelligence / counterintelligence type of film, especially when it concerns the middle east. I also love Ridley Scott, so I enjoyed this movie a lot.

 

I also think William Monahan is a very good writer.

 

you know whats better than that? body of evidence. man madonna was fuckin hot in that movie.

i agree but body of evidence was quite a bad movie, but it it still is superior to another downward spiral of a career left-over by the man formerly known as the great Ridley Scott.

Russel Crowe's fake georgian accent was too much on it's own to handle. And yes for those not in the know Inglorious bastards has also been ruined for me preemptively due to Bradd Pitt's attempts at Southern drawl. I also find it very hard to like any 'behind the scenes of the CIA' type of movie these days. Probably the last one i found remotely enjoyable was 'Enemy of the state' mostly because they portrayed the CIA as comic book like with Jack Black and Seth Green being the guys behind the computers

 

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:02 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 1:46 AM, Adjective said:

portraying multiple timelines as one makes for some information overload i think, and that's why people rewatch

 

maybe he tried and failed but it looks like your rating is even out of spite

 

yeah, it is. I guess it'd be 6/10 for being stimulating, but it got on my tits that they took the time to make the credits look like a sharper image catalog, but didn't spend a bit more time on explication. Maybe I will rewatch it, I'm sure it'll just give me a big headache.

 

it is a confusing movie but i think it's far less pretentious than a lot of other movies that are totally confusing but also have no explanation. What i appreciate about Primer is that it does have a very concrete and very follow-able plot if you watch it a few times, few other 'pretentious indie films' can make this claim.

 

ok, well I agree, if it does have a followable plot then it's not really pretentious. But seriously, did you figure it out all by yourself, or did you read some reviews? I think I got the overarching idea from watching it once - I did understand the part about their future selves being locked in the cupboard/attic, and the idea that there was some sort of tit-for-tat going on, but if I watch it again will I really understand the guy stalking them in the car? The takedown of the guy (one of the two of them?) in the alley, the earbleed, and the shotgun incident/love triangle? I wish they'd left out the shotgun thing (unless it was related to one of the other two guys on their team trying to get revenge for the two main characters running wild with their invention). It was 5 am and I was a bit drunk, and I make no claims to being particularly bright, but I did figure out the Prestige early on, Memento, etc. This one seems a bit more opaque...

i definitely didn't figure out all of stuff until reading discussion about it but..

the loneliness of the long distance runner

klute

night moves

beverly hills cop

beetlejuice - for whatever reason I hadn't seen it or BHC.

the osterman weekend - I've only seen straw dogs so far, but after this I'll be on the lookout for more peckinpah.

to live and die in l.a

enjoyed the lot.

Dude I love Primer

  futuregirlfriend said:

to live and die in l.a

Great underrated action film.

man i liked primer too but i feel you lumpenprol. i thought it was a cool idea that was presented uniquely but lacked any real emotional weight. it was cool to try to "figure out" or whatever but at the end i didn't feel like i really cared about either of the characters or like i was really moved by what had happened you know? the director has said that the end is supposed to be confusing to mirror how the characters feel going through time over and over, and on one hand i respect the meta-symbolism or whatever goin on there but on the other hand i feel like it could have been great if it had been a bit more fleshed out. the party in particular was glossed over way too much considering its apparent importance.

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:46 AM, Adjective said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:22 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:04 AM, Awepittance said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 9:56 PM, olson said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 5:28 PM, The Overlook said:

Body of Lies - Well, I'm a sucker, admittedly, for the whole espionage / intelligence / counterintelligence type of film, especially when it concerns the middle east. I also love Ridley Scott, so I enjoyed this movie a lot.

 

I also think William Monahan is a very good writer.

 

you know whats better than that? body of evidence. man madonna was fuckin hot in that movie.

i agree but body of evidence was quite a bad movie, but it it still is superior to another downward spiral of a career left-over by the man formerly known as the great Ridley Scott.

Russel Crowe's fake georgian accent was too much on it's own to handle. And yes for those not in the know Inglorious bastards has also been ruined for me preemptively due to Bradd Pitt's attempts at Southern drawl. I also find it very hard to like any 'behind the scenes of the CIA' type of movie these days. Probably the last one i found remotely enjoyable was 'Enemy of the state' mostly because they portrayed the CIA as comic book like with Jack Black and Seth Green being the guys behind the computers

 

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:02 AM, lumpenprol said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 1:46 AM, Adjective said:

portraying multiple timelines as one makes for some information overload i think, and that's why people rewatch

 

maybe he tried and failed but it looks like your rating is even out of spite

 

yeah, it is. I guess it'd be 6/10 for being stimulating, but it got on my tits that they took the time to make the credits look like a sharper image catalog, but didn't spend a bit more time on explication. Maybe I will rewatch it, I'm sure it'll just give me a big headache.

 

it is a confusing movie but i think it's far less pretentious than a lot of other movies that are totally confusing but also have no explanation. What i appreciate about Primer is that it does have a very concrete and very follow-able plot if you watch it a few times, few other 'pretentious indie films' can make this claim.

 

ok, well I agree, if it does have a followable plot then it's not really pretentious. But seriously, did you figure it out all by yourself, or did you read some reviews? I think I got the overarching idea from watching it once - I did understand the part about their future selves being locked in the cupboard/attic, and the idea that there was some sort of tit-for-tat going on, but if I watch it again will I really understand the guy stalking them in the car? The takedown of the guy (one of the two of them?) in the alley, the earbleed, and the shotgun incident/love triangle? I wish they'd left out the shotgun thing (unless it was related to one of the other two guys on their team trying to get revenge for the two main characters running wild with their invention). It was 5 am and I was a bit drunk, and I make no claims to being particularly bright, but I did figure out the Prestige early on, Memento, etc. This one seems a bit more opaque...

 

 

i saw it about 3 times and was still pretty confused but intrigued so i ended up watching it with the commentary on and was even more immersed after hearing his explanations on it. I am a david lynch fan but sometimes i find certain aspects of his movies very unsatisfying. Those tense scenes where something extremely weird and creepy happens like in Lost Highway where robert blake's character asks Bill pullman's character to call him at his house, its an awesome scene that sends chills up my spine but the payoff for it later on it is kind of weak. Primer feels to me like what if David Lynch's weirdness actually had a coherent reason for existing, something grounded in reality. i can only remember reading one review of Primer ever and it was before i saw it. They described it as a 'dot com indie film' that had a lot of mumbling dialogue, 'mumble core' as some refer to it. I was a little hesitant when i first started watching it because i remember finding that review pretty hilarious.but i quickly changed my mind. Check out the commentary if you care to watch it again.

to respond to olson and adjective,...

 

  Reveal hidden contents

i think the movie at least for me carries a lot of emotional weight just based on the concept of not having control of one's own future. Once they discover that a virtually unknown number of future versions of themselves are not only meddling with the timeline but doing things and making decisions that the current versions are not privy to it would become torturous. It would be like being stuck in a Lynchian nightmare with no apparent end to the damage already done to the universe. You are also never sure how many of these doubles there are at any given time, and even which versions (2nd gen, 3rd gen) you are watching. My understanding is that when Abe first walks up to aaron near the park bench with the lawn is that a future Abe is trying to help a past (or current depending on how you look at it ) version of Aaron get an upper-hand on the situation. Abe even acts amused as Aaron appears to organically discover and fill in the blanks the methods of how to use the box to time travel(ie: 'you're saying we can make a bigger box' 'i did't say it you did') , when in fact Aaron has been through this before or maybe in the previous run it was Abe who filled in those blanks.

 

 

I hear what you're saying, but either way it's kind of annoying: if he plotted it exquisitely like a sequence of russian dolls, or he just made it "trippy and disjointed at the end." Assuming he actually plotted out all the time sequencing carefully, did he really expect his audience to have to do the same? I guess maybe it's not his fault, the concept is inherently not well suited for film.

  On 7/27/2009 at 2:04 AM, Awepittance said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 9:56 PM, olson said:

  On 7/26/2009 at 5:28 PM, The Overlook said:

Body of Lies - Well, I'm a sucker, admittedly, for the whole espionage / intelligence / counterintelligence type of film, especially when it concerns the middle east. I also love Ridley Scott, so I enjoyed this movie a lot.

 

I also think William Monahan is a very good writer.

 

you know whats better than that? body of evidence. man madonna was fuckin hot in that movie.

 

 

I bought body of evidence on dvd so i could -- off to the scenes where madonna gets --- . Theyre so hot.

  On 7/27/2009 at 1:49 AM, zaphod said:

i thought primer was really impressive given the budget. there's some big flaws, the narration is annoying and some of the acting is stilted and awkward, but i think it deserves a high rating simply because of what was accomplished given the money he had. don't shit all over primer and then give transformers a pass or whatever.

Whatever dude you say the same kind of shit. You will knock shit down out of pure spite.

you're so angry all the time salads. so aggressive and confrontational. do you want to fuck me?

Not if you don't look me in the eyes

Ravenous

loved it

i really like Ravenous

it's a shame the Ravenous dvd is horribly encoded. i don't know if they've rereleased it but the version i have looks like a single disc divx rip

  On 7/27/2009 at 10:49 PM, Adjective said:

i really like Ravenous

it's a shame the Ravenous dvd is horribly encoded. i don't know if they've rereleased it but the version i have looks like a single disc divx rip

I don't think they've re-released it... Doesn't seem to be a very popular flick. That being said, I find it terribly underrated.

Ali G Indahouse - 6/10

  On 7/27/2009 at 11:50 PM, sneaksta303 said:

  On 7/27/2009 at 10:49 PM, Adjective said:

i really like Ravenous

it's a shame the Ravenous dvd is horribly encoded. i don't know if they've rereleased it but the version i have looks like a single disc divx rip

 

I don't think they've re-released it... Doesn't seem to be a very popular flick. That being said, I find it terribly underrated.

qft

I love when they are all eating those bloody as fuck steaks in the beginning... starts the mood off right if ya ask me!

  On 7/28/2009 at 1:51 AM, sneaksta303 said:

I love when they are all eating those bloody as fuck steaks in the beginning... starts the mood off right if ya ask me!

yes lots of meaty moments in that movie :)

too bad the concept behind the movie is false, or I'd be the healthiest, strongest, and smartest man alive... With an insatiable (Ravenous) hunger if you will...