Random Entertainment Topic




DOPENESS! i love this movie so much.


The chick is "special needs" in the movie which makes it all the cooler that she is kicking ass, great movie.
 
  • Like
Reactions: rankandfile
I thought it was pretty good, though the acting is pretty atrocious at times. I was kinda put off at first with the edgy camera style, especially when there are scenes with a lot of tension. I also liked how they changed up a bunch of the characters, like Starbuck, from the original.
 
I liked it quite a bit. I caught almost every episode on the night it originally aired. You don't see too many sci-fi television series come along, and this was easily one of the best. Say what you will about the acting, but James Callis as Gaius Baltar was excellent.
 
Finished it over the holidays. I hear what you are saying about the political stuff. There's more in the later seasons. I had a rough start with it too. Eventually, I just settled into it and just enjoyed. There's episodes I didn't like and others I loved. I had lots of questions at the end and still wish there were more. I do think the wrapped the show in time. Any longer and it would've jumped.
 
I enjoyed pretty much every minute of the BSG reboot. There were episodes I liked more than others but I can't think of any one episode I didn't like at all. I think I've watched the entire series 4-5 times now and go back to it every year or so when I'm in the mood for some dark sci-fi.
 
  • Like
Reactions: JinCA
I watched them all.

What I would say is I don't think cult status is always directly linked with the quality of a specific show (or film for that matter).

I think the concept just sort of caught on and some of the characters were pretty outstanding.

As the show moved forward, it sort of became more and more absurd in a way, but it didn't stop me enjoying it. It was quite enthralling at times (although clearly not without its flaws).

I too have questioned whether it should have achieved real critical and cultural acclaim, but I guess people like what they like.

I would at least stick with it for a couple of series (series'?).
 
What I was really bummed about was that Caprica was canceled. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand why, because it was pretty goddamn bad. Still, I would have loved to see at least a second season to see how the cylons revolted and so forth.
 
I liked it quite a bit. I caught almost every episode on the night it originally aired. You don't see too many sci-fi television series come along, and this was easily one of the best. Say what you will about the acting, but James Callis as Gaius Baltar was excellent.

I agree. I will say, as the series went along the acting did get better. I think what exacerbated the acting was the film style, it almost came across as soap opera like.
 
As of 1/5/14:

($830.9m) The Hunger Game: Catching Fire
($756.6m) The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
($663.4m) Gravity
($639.9m) Frozen
($630.5m) Thor The Dark World

Holy smurfy. I wasn't expected Frozen to overtake Thor The Dark World. Interesting. The Hunger Game is now in $800 millions. It looks like it could reach $1 billion club but only time will tell.
 
Currently watching season 2 and really liking it so I'm going to leave this thread.
 
I really enjoyed the series, the initial mini series was probably the weakest as far as acting etc but I think things really got better with each season.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BDaddyK
I really enjoyed the pilot mini series, season 1 and most of season 2 but towards the end of season 2 it all got a bit too fantasy for me. I skipped through the rest of the episodes and it got worse and worse in my opinion. It was a bit of a shame as I really liked a lot of the characters in the show.
 
Well, name a really good Kung-Fu movie in the past 5 years, well produced and geared toward the West?! NONE IMHO. Those kind of movies with well known Asian actors aren't being made. Like Stallone revived the 80's actions heroes in Expendables someone needs to to the same with Asian actors and kung-Fu movies.
 
After like a dozen attempts to watch the show I finally managed it and loved it. Amazing Sci-fi show. Seen it several times since from start to finish.
 
Other than Upstream Color being suggested to me on Netflix, and me liking the quick synopsis, I had no clue what the movie was about. I was not expecting the movie that I saw. With it's disjointed narration, and being void of any sort of a plot, Upstream Color offers a ton of discussion. Bollocks did a wonderful job up above in capturing the movie as a whole.

Watching the film I felt as if I was in a fog and not really understanding what was going on. I couldn't get comfortable watching it. I was lost. About three fourths of the way through I thought, "Ummm, this is how the characters feel!" As the characters were lost in their ways, and slowly piecing their lives together, I found myself becoming more aware of the movie. Not saying I "got it," this really isn't a movie you can 'get.' Carruth did a wonderful job of slowly piecing the film together as the movie progressed. Upstream Color started all over the place and by the end it's much more accessible. As a viewer, this mimics the feelings the characters were having.

Bollocks touched on the use of color in the film. It plays a vita role in conveying emotion to the viewer without it really being overt. The biggest use of color seems to be a whitewash over everything. When the characters are in their fog, there's a large presence of white and low contrast on the screen. As the characters progress in finding their beginning, or end, the contrast seems to begin to slowly come back. Their foggy mind is slowly being lifted and they're able to get their bearings back in their lives.

Bollocks, interesting about the comparison to The Tree of Life. I thought the same thing as I was watching. It was very familiar to me and I got the 'observing characters' feeling I had in The Tree of Life. With that, the premise of Upstream Color, the cycle of nature, is not far off from The Tree of Life. Both films are about beginnings, middles, ends, and beginnings again. There's s shared cyclical nature of both films.

I can't wait to get more dialogue from others about Upstream Color. It's a great discussion film and I'm glad I happened to select it as our first Movie of the Month club selection.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Bollocks
I loved it. Acting was a bit cheesy sometimes, but it did get better as the show progressed. I do think the series ending was one of the best, not just the actual last episode, but the way they brought the series to a close over the last few episodes.
 
I hope this gets released for the home either digitally or through hard copy. I've read about it in the past and I've always wanted to see it. I'm glad the restoration is finally complete and the documentary is getting a release.

via Haaretz

Hitchcock's long-forgotten Holocaust film finally restored, nearly 70 years on.

With restoration of historical Holocaust footage almost complete, how will contemporary audiences react to a film that traumatized the king of thrillers?

A Holocaust documentary created by thriller film master Alfred Hitchcock based on Soviet and British footage of World War II camps will finally be screened to the public in its entirety nearly 70 years after it was made, The Independent revealed on Wednesday.

The film, which took longer to create than Hitchcock and patron Sidney Bernstein anticipated, was put in the drawer in 1945 when the Allied military government apparently decided that a documentary highlighting the German atrocities would do more harm than good.

"It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British," The Independent quotes Dr. Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum, as saying. "Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

Five of the six film reels were stored in the Imperial War Museum, not to be seen again until the 1980s, when an American researcher found the footage in a "rusty can" in the museum, The Independent reported. The documentary was screened in its unfinished and unrefined version at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 and on American PBS in 1985.

The Imperial War Museum subsequently undertook the task of restoring the film using digital technology to clean up the footage and attach the missing sixth reel. The final product, it believes, matches the version that Hitchcock and his co-collaborators had intended.

The documentary will finally be screened in its entirety, along with the original version, in festival and cinemas over the course of the next year, and on British television in 2015, as the world marks 70 years since the end of World War II.

The Independent's report on the documentary also reveals a little-known fact about Hitchcock: That the filmmaker who chilled millions of viewers to the bone with his psychological thrillers, was actually quite unnerved by the "real thing" he saw in the Soviet and British footage.
More via The Independent (more at link)

The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hithcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by "the real thing".

In 1945, Hithcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.

"It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British," suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. "Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans' noses in their own guilt wouldn't help with postwar reconstruction.​
 
I don't know, not to say I wouldn't mind seeing it, but I've also had my fill of holocaust movies and documentaries. I might make an exception if it gets released in theaters, otherwise I might skip it.
 
I saw a documentary called "Memories of the Camp" with some very sparse, matter of fact narration. I think they filmed it right after the allies arrived. It put me in a very dark mood that lasted for days. It was nothing like the other documentaries I'd seen, which were more detached and story-telling, and nothing at all like movies, which were of course dramatized narratives. This was like you were there. I can still remember the images.

Sometimes, a piece of work will really stay with me. That one did. I was in a dark gloom for days. Couldn't believe how awful people could be. Just incredible. It really wrecked my trust in humanity for a while. Nothing I've seen since then has impacted me even half as much.

"The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hithcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by "the real thing"."

I'm pretty sure that's the footage I saw, too, and I completely understand his reaction.

I might be interested in his film. Sounds like he had the sensibility for it.
 
when I have more time I will give this movie a better review.
Hats off to Bollocks for starting the discussion as his review is better and more concise then any reviews I have read on Rotten tomatoes immedialy after viewing the movie. Are you a writer, Bollocks? I am not worthy!
But alas this is my quick summation on the movie that I sent to a friend via PM on FB ( I do intend to delve into this move a lot more later and most likely will watch it again):


Upstream Color's cinema-photography is reminiscent of Terrence Malick yet the symbolism whether real or imagined is very creepy and sort of reminds me of the days I spent pondering Donnie Darko. I put it up there with with DD as extremely head scratching but a bit more rewarding. Definetely worth a lot of discussion
 
  • Like
Reactions: Bollocks
Hah, I wish I was a writer! Unfortunately I must be content with working in an office by day/fighting crime by night.

I think that with a movie like this, the fact that there's so much to talk about is almost a hindrance to talking about it, if that makes any sense whatsoever. I mean once you get some kind of idea about the movie it's so easy to lose focus, and just keep talking and talking without really getting anywhere (bit like what I did in my post above) and at the very end you're kind of left there saying "But um, wait, what was I talking about again?". A lot of that has to do with the structure that team56th was sort of talking about.

There's the bones of a traditional story structure in the movie... Kris has her life ruined by a Thief, then Jeff tries to help her with the power of true love or whatever, and in the end they stop the Thief, help his victims, and restore balance to the force. Except as we all know that it's, um, a little more complicated than that. The time frame is literally f***ed. Okay not literally. But close enough. So much of the movie has seemingly nothing to do with the plot, actions and motivations are left largely unexplained. I don't know about you guys but when the movie finished I said to myself "huh, I liked that. I just wish I knew what the f*** that was." It's really tricky to get a lot of meaning out of a movie like this because it's structured so differently from what we'd be used to.

Like if we were talking about, I dunno, Scarface. Well we've all seen a dozen movies like Scarface so we could compare it and it's almost like we know the "language" that movie is talking in. We're trained by other movies how to follow and comprehend that movie style. How many movie like Upstream Color can we look at? I dunno... two, three? None? It's like trying being a tourist in a country that doesn't speak English and trying to get directions. Someone is pointing and gesturing and might even have some phrases like "go to the end of the road" or "me love you long time" so you kind of understand what's going on... but unless you know that language things are gonna be tough.

Hah, I'm losing focus again aren't I? Well I guess what I'm saying is about structure, I think that looking at this movie like you would any "traditional" movie isn't going to get you anywhere. But that's actually not a bad thing, because even though the movie seems overwhelming and almost impossible to make sense of at first, if you just focus on one particular thing then the ball really gets rolling.

Knowing where to begin is probably the biggest problem people have with talking about this, but I think that's because it's not a "familiar" movie, Upstream Color kind of throws you in at the deep end, there's very little for us to hang on to and say "okay I see where this movie is going now". But just coming up with any particular idea or interpretation on your own is what I think is most important, and just going from there. I sort of think of it like pulling a loose thread on a sweater. Just pick a place to start and then the whole thing will unravel. I mean, it won't make any sense and at the end you'll just be covered in a big pile of thread.... but um, wait, what was I talking about again?
 
Hitchcock did have a tendency to have a kind of ironic, almost comic detachment in his films. I hope he keeps that stuff out of this film. I don't think it would work at all. I assume he's smart enough to know that.
 
YAY....My copy finally turned up ( screw you play.com). Gunna watch it in about 2 hours:banana: