The Pitters' Place

Seen Basterds a dozen times, seen Django maybe three or four, trying to pull something out of it. Can't do it.

Gendo wrote:Only seen each of those once, but I would generally agree with your assessment, except adding more praise to Inglorious Basterds.

This.

Flicks re-seen

Cop Land - 7.5/10
Sly Stallone plays an affable sheriff in a small New Jersey town, right across the way from the big city. The town was founded by NYPD cops who needed a place to live outside of New York City proper. So the town's population is made up almost entirely of cops. This makes the crime rate relatively low, but it's general knowledge among the citizens that most of the cops (and definitely the "head" cops) are extremely corrupt (We find out later that the town was built with mob money, for example), and this is a big reason why the main corrupt cops hired Sly; they know he's quiet and meek and wouldn't rat them out. Anyway, Harvey Keitel, Robert de Niro, Ray Liotta all star with Sly. It's a pretty great, overlooked little mob/cop movie from the 90s. Good stuff.

Rounders - 7/10
Matt Damon plays a really good poker player who gets out of the underground lifestyle to focus on law school at the behest of his girlfriend. One day, he picks up his friend, Ed Norton, from jail and they immediately find seedy card games to play in and hustle people. Norton's a shady motherfucker who always seems to be in trouble but Damon can't stay away because he's his friend. Anyway, they get into some shit and end up having to play their way out blah blah blah. Kind of cheesy, but entertaining.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - 10/10
One of the all-time greats. Jack Nicholson is a crook who weasels his way into a mental hospital in lieu of jail time. Here he meets all sorts of interesting characters, both friend and foe. He's a wise-cracking fun-loving son of a bitch-type, so he tries to inject liveliness into the otherwise boring and complacent mental ward. The head nurse is an asshole and they're constantly at odds. Eventually, Jack's fun goes a bit too far and he suffers the consequences. If you haven't seen this movie, I don't know what's wrong with you.

sikax wrote: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - 10/10
One of the all-time greats. Jack Nicholson is a crook who weasels his way into a mental hospital in lieu of jail time. Here he meets all sorts of interesting characters, both friend and foe. He's a wise-cracking fun-loving son of a bitch-type, so he tries to inject liveliness into the otherwise boring and complacent mental ward. The head nurse is an asshole and they're constantly at odds. Eventually, Jack's fun goes a bit too far and he suffers the consequences. If you haven't seen this movie, I don't know what's wrong with you.

The book was better.

I agree.

Black Mass - 6.75/10

This movie is the equivalent of a morning in which you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock every 15 minutes or so for two hours and then you finally say "Fuck it" and stay asleep. They kept hinting at something interesting happening and then it didn't happen. I like Johnny Depp, and he does a fine job as the archetypal gangster, but, I mean, nothing new here. It's not bad. It wasn't good, but it wasn't bad.

sikax wrote:Black Mass - 6.75/10

This movie is the equivalent of a morning in which you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock every 15 minutes or so for two hours and then you finally say "Fuck it" and stay asleep. They kept hinting at something interesting happening and then it didn't happen. I like Johnny Depp, and he does a fine job as the archetypal gangster, but, I mean, nothing new here. It's not bad. It wasn't good, but it wasn't bad.

Agreed. As was once said in a Pinky & the Brain episode: "Not half bad...not half good either"

hey, you should review The Visit

I'll be seeing that soon, I'm sure.

Flick re-seen

The Princess Bride - 8.5/10
Shit's hilarious. Hints of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, but retains an innocent sort of tone, which adds to its charm. Great classic comedy if you haven't seen it.

sikax wrote:Flick re-seen

The Princess Bride - 8.5/10
Shit's hilarious. Hints of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, but retains an innocent sort of tone, which adds to its charm. Great classic comedy if you haven't seen it.

Love the Sicilian bit.

I saw it on 35mm at a local theater. Big screens are awesome. Next week they're playing Rear Window.

I got into some martial arts flicks somehow.

Let's see, IP Man 1, 2 and 3. 9/10

and a bunch more but I have to check my Netflix account because I forget. Something like Tears of the Sun maybe?

Tears of the Sun is a Bruce Willis flick where he goes into the jungle and saves a bunch of refugees Rambo-style. Pretty lame. Probably not what you're talking about.

Ok got them. All three IP Man flicks, The Man From Nowhere, and No Tears for the Dead. The last two are quite beautiful films.

Rounders deserves a higher rating. That joint is a classic.

10/10 would bang. Yes...I would have sex with that movie if I could.

The best part of that movie is John Malkovich's hilariously awful Russian accent. That shit is hilarious.

"He beeut mee. Sturaight up. Mppaay him. Mppaayy thyat myan his muuney."

"Peeay thyeat meyan hyeez mooyunney."

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OU_8zkvw4?t=1m44s[/youtube]

Rubble Kings

Really well-made and informative documentary about the history of gang activity in the Bronx throughout the 60s and 70s and how these gangs subsequently led to the birth of hip-hop culture. It's basically the real life story of The Warriors. Rather quite good and historically important.

Flicks re-seen

Nightcrawler - 10/10

Apocalypse Now - 10/10

Rear Window - 10/10

The Silence of the Lambs - 10/10


I'll talk about these tomorrow when I'm awake. Just putting this here so I don't forget that I watched them today.

Have you seen Manhunter? I like it better than Red Dragon, even though I absolutely love Edward Norton and Anthony Hopkins.

Yeah, I've seen them both a couple times. I had seen Silence before seeing Manhunter, so Lecter was Hopkins was Lecter to me, ya know. It was tough to see anyone else do the role, and maybe that's why Brian Cox wasn't as effective for me. Red Dragon was decent. Didn't love either one.

Flick re-seen

Shutter Island - 9/10
Things about mental illness and its ilk really resonate with me, and I can see why that bias makes me like certain movies more than I probably would objectively, this being one of them. I don't know why I said that. Whatever. Anyway, this is a weird one because it's Scorsese but it's....not Scorsese. This is a complete separation from his typical mob/crime form (probably why it got zero Oscar nominations), and, in turn, very refreshing. It's like Scorsese had just watched The Shining, Memento, and Vertigo all in one sitting and decided to make a movie. Sprinkle a bit of The Truman Show in the pot. And add Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a wonderful recipe, with a twist of lemon.

I really like Shutter Island. I've seen it twice now. It's almost comically heavy-handed at times (the soundtrack is basically ANGRY FOGHORNS) but it's very interesting and atmospheric and Mark Ruffalo tends to improve everything with his general presence.

The music is one of my favorite things about it. It was definitely deliberately done "old-school", and I love it.

SIcario - 7.465/10

The director is Denis Villeneuve. He directed two excellent films in the last three years: Prisoners and Enemy. Both films had elements of surrealism tied into heavy plots. Sicario has an adequately heavy plot, but none of Villeneuve's trademark strangeness. Overall, it's a decent crime flick, but nothing spectacular. Emily Blunt plays an idealistic FBI agent who gets caught up in the CIA's war on drugs. She tags along on a mission to Juarez to take a small-time jefe into custody and witnesses several accounts of corruption that don't sit well with her. Josh Brolin plays the main CIA guy whose job it is to ease Blunt into it, like, "Sometimes you got to bend the rules," type of thing. Blunt's the typical heart-of-gold naive type who gets exposed to the real world. Think Ethan Hawke in Training Day, basically. So they do a bunch of little missions together trying to get to the Big Boss. It turns out the main objective for all this was so Benicio del Toro (who plays kind of an ex-Colombian drug kingpin/mercenary who's hired by Josh Brolin and the CIA to help out) could get revenge on the Mexican jefe that killed his family (seeing as Benicio was competition in the drug trade). All the little things that lead up to Benicio getting to the Mexican jefe are justified by Brolin as means of making a dent in the war on drugs. And what have you.

At one point after Blunt has seen some shit go down and confronts Brolin on all the illegal tactics he's using, he explains that there is no way in Hell that the drugs will ever EVER stop coming or all the subsequent money and violence. And that stopping anything is not the objective of the CIA or any other agency "fighting" the war. The objective is to maintain a level of order among all the cartels and the seemingly chaotic cloud of drugs. From order comes control. He pretty much alludes to the idea that the United States government decides who lives, who dies, who is in charge of the cartels, who gets to be successful, who gets caught, everything. The money and blood keep flowing, and they get to keep their jobs. "Necessary evil" kind of thing. Benicio delivers a good line in this light after Emily asks him to brief her on how the cartels operate. He says, "You're asking me how a watch works. Why don't we just focus on the time." Or something like that.

Nothing new here. There are a few scenes built with impressive suspense. Good music. Benicio's always great. Take it or leave it.

I didn't quite get how she figured out Shane from the Walking Dead.

I had to Google that reference because I've never watched that show.

Jon Bernthal's character took his keys out of his pocket before they were going to have sex and in the heap was one of the rubber bracelets that Emily had previously seen the money launderer using to bundle the money rolls at the bank. Remember the bank? With the blonde-haired lady depositing money? Every wad of money had the same colorful rubber bracelet holding it together. She saw it on him, connected the dots. I mean, she was pretty stupid for going into the bank and exposing herself. Brolin even warned her and she didn't listen. And paid the consequences.

sikax wrote:I had to Google that reference because I've never watched that show.

Jon Bernthal's character took his keys out of his pocket before they were going to have sex and in the heap was one of the rubber bracelets that Emily had previously seen the money launderer using to bundle the money rolls at the bank. Remember the bank? With the blonde-haired lady depositing money? Every wad of money had the same colorful rubber bracelet holding it together. She saw it on him, connected the dots. I mean, she was pretty stupid for going into the bank and exposing herself. Brolin even warned her and she didn't listen. And paid the consequences.

Ok, I thought it had something to do with the rubber bracelet, but I didn't remember it from the bank scene, which is why I was confused.

Flicks re-seen

Boogie Nights - 7/10
Lots of penises and cocaine. Not PTA's best, but adequately strange.

Bourne trilogy - 7.5/10
Matt Damon at his Matt Damon-iest.

Sphere - ??/10

So, uh. OK, first of all. Uh. OK. So, the first time I saw eXistenZ I was 16 years old. My mental stability was, um, unstable back then. I was a silly silly teenager doing a lot of drugs and had a baby on the way. I watched that movie for no particular reason and it was so strange and surreal that it made me cry. Not out of sadness or anything logical, just unadulterated insanity. Since then I have matured a lot and have watched eXistenZ multiple times and it doesn't strike me as hard anymore; I've shed the innocence that once made it profound, I guess.

Yesterday, I watched a movie called Sphere. It was made in 1998 and stars Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, and a bunch of other famous people, so I thought it wasn't going to be much more than a typical 90's action sci-fi flick, predictable, whatever. It was far from that. I felt like I was 16 again and watching eXistenZ for the first time. I wish I was 16, naive, open to new things, taking things in unabridged and without reason. This movie is FUCKING GREAT in its strangeness. I look forward to watching it again.

I remember seeing sphere but it's been so long I don't remember anything about it.

Short version: A bunch of genius scientists explore an alien ship and at some point begin questioning reality and all become super paranoid and almost kill themselves and then later have to force their minds to forget the whole experience in order to save the planet from the knowledge of time travel.

Basically .

I finally saw Sphere a few years ago... I say finally because I'd been wanting to see it for at least 10 years at that time. I liked it a lot. Pretty similar to Event Horizon I guess?

Just saw Equilibrium. One of the stupidest movies I've ever seen. It's great. The soundtrack is pretty good.

Yes, it is great. And admittedly a bit stupid, but mostly great.

I love Equilibrium. It's why my sister and I can't mention Taye Diggs without shouting 'HE IS THE ONE WHO IS FEEEEEELING'.

I still have major problems with the premise. Sure, they get rid of negative emotions like anger and hatred and whatnot because it led to war, which makes sense, but why get rid of positive emotions too? What's the point of that? It wasn't explained. I guess it was because they never figured out a way to get rid of only the negative side? They could have said so. As it is we're just left to assume that in the future the government thinks all emotions are bad, which would never happen in a million years.

Derived Absurdity wrote:I still have major problems with the premise. Sure, they get rid of negative emotions like anger and hatred and whatnot because it led to war, which makes sense, but why get rid of positive emotions too? What's the point of that? It wasn't explained. I guess it was because they never figured out a way to get rid of only the negative side? They could have said so. As it is we're just left to assume that in the future the government thinks all emotions are bad, which would never happen in a million years.

I reckon the thinking is that all emotions are connected, or at least stem from similar sources. If something makes me happy but makes another person angry (like a song or an ideal), then in order to get rid of the angry emotion seen in some, the government would ban that song, but it would also be ridding me of my happy emotion. It's inevitable. In the same vein, the presence of joyousness or love in someone could very reasonably make a less fortunate person jealous and subsequently angry and violent. It also seems logistically easier to find a chemical that eliminates any chance of emotion than one that could pinpoint specific emotions and target them.

ALSO, a positive emotion like love could potentially start a war. Love very easily begets jealousy. How could a scientist whose goal is to block jealousy account for love naturally turning into jealousy? Might as well just nip the love in the bud.

Then you have ambiguous emotions like pride. Pride can be good; it can motivate someone to defend something or can promote positive actions. Pride can also be nasty and delude people into creating conflicts that don't necessarily exist for the other party who doesn't share your pride. Might as well nip the pride in the bud.

Etc.

The point is, all emotions are similarly ambiguous and could be perceived as good or bad from different perspectives. It's logical that a government with that amount of ambition to find it reasonable to simply outlaw them all. Leave no room for error.

That makes a certain amount of sense, but I don't really buy it. Emotions are literally the only reason anything matters. They're the only reasons we do anything at all. There would be no point in not having war, or of having a government, or of existing at all, if we couldn't have a positive emotional reaction to it. The only reason we consider some things good or bad is because we feel good or bad in direct response to them. So you can't get rid of emotions... because you would then be getting rid of the only justification for doing anything in the world at all.

I also don't really buy the idea that getting rid of all emotions is logistically easier than simply getting rid of the ones we don't like. Our brain runs on emotion. It's the engine that drives us. It's what gives us motivation, desire, a reason to do anything. It's impossible to be conscious and feel literally nothing at all. Hedonic neutrality is simply an abstraction, a good concept with which to analyze and compare things, but it's not something that actually exists or anything we can actually feel. If you're not feeling anything, you're not conscious. Period. Consciousness is feeling.

There are also chemicals today which sharply enhance positive feelings and decrease negative feelings, euphoriants and empathogens like MDMA and some of its relatives, for example. On pure MDMA and certain others it's virtually impossible to do anything anti-social or feel anything negative, and empathetic and euphoric feelings and behaviors are sharply intensified. It's pretty well-understood, neurologically. So creating a functional analogue of some sort that could last longer and be injected routinely like Prozium or whatever it's called would probably be just as easy, be just as effective at stopping wars and stuff, and still give people a reason to live. I can't really imagine the government outlawing all emotion when an alternative like that is available.

To the first two paragraphs: Yeah, that's why the dictatorship failed. To outlaw emotion is to outlaw life. Even the fuckin head cheese appreciated the value of emotion. He just liked control. It was a ticking time bomb until someone had had enough of the bullshit.

To the third paragraph: Maybe, yeah, but it's a fictional universe constructed for such an analysis of the meaning of emotion, which you outlined in the first two paragraphs. Perhaps we could synthesize something to block negative emotions, but who would want that?

I mean, it's a movie. To say "no government would ever do that" doesn't really fly. My previous post was attempting to understand why the government in the movie did it. If we discard some ludicrous act in a movie as supremely unrealistic and throw away any hope for analysis or discussion then what's the point of indulging in any work of fiction?

That's probably why you shouldn't watch movies with me.

I'd much rather talk about something we disagree on than both agree on everything all the time.

But yeah, you seem to suck to be around.

On MDMA I'm not!

OK, you bring the MDMA and I'll bring the coke and we'll have a movie marathon and hopefully one of us isn't murdered by the end of it.

Deal. I wouldn't want to watch a movie on MDMA, though. Mostly I'd just want to touch everything. So... be prepared for that.

Flick re-seen

The Wolf of Wall Street - 7.3/10
Funny stuff. It never really feels like a Scorsese flick, but it's a lot of fun. Drugs and sex and the stupidity of excess blah blah blah. I dunno. What was the point of this movie?