What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in Time

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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Geezer »

Killing Them Softly - F

What an awful piece of rubbish. What the hell was the point? So little happens and what does is so boring and pointless that I found my attention drifting to other things. Just a mess. I really almost shut it off, which I NEVER do. Worst film I've seen in a long time. I've never been so let down by Brad Pitt. Glad I didn't pay to see it, just used a free Red Box code. At least it was short.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Buscemi »

If you think Killing Them Softly was Pitt's worst, then you need to see Cool World (which should have been a great movie based on the director and great teaser trailer), The Devil's Own, Ocean's Twelve, Troy and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

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I've seen two of those, Troy and Ocean's 12. I agree that Ocean's 12 was awful, though not this bad. I liked Troy, though it should have been a lot better, so that I was also disappointed in. But this was just an hour and a half of my life I'll never get back.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by BanksIsDaFuture »

Cool World is great, I used to watch it all the time when I was little. And I do like Mr. & Mrs. Smith - it's fantastic if only for the chemistry between Brad and Jolie.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Chienfantome »

Well, Killing them softly was on of the best US films I've seen last year ;)
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Buscemi »

Based on Chien's recommendation and the fact that there was a remake recently, I decided to track down the original LOL and I watched the original and remake back to back.

My opinions:

LOL (Laughing Out Loud) - one of the decade's better teen films. It feels nothing like an American teen film (where most filmmakers simply copy John Hughes) and in places actually feels real. Not a masterpiece but a decent film that deserved better distribution in the US (I also feel it's a better film to show to a teenager than 85% of Hollywood's teen product). ***/**** (8/10 on IMDb)

LOL - this is what happens when you take everything that was good about the original and replace it with cliches from a CW series. This felt more like a bad TV show than a film and Miley Cyrus is horribly miscast in the lead (the film is also horribly dated but that's the least of its problems). It's also hard to believe that both films had the same director as the original was so strong but this was so awful. TURD/**** (1/10 on IMDb)
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Chienfantome »

Did I recommend you the LOL films ? I'm surprised (what on Earth did I drink that night ?), because I haven't seen any of them, neither the French original nor the US remake.
Well, I'm still glad you preferred the French one :twisted:
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Buscemi »

When the remake came out, I remember that you were praising the original.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Chienfantome »

I certainly mentionned how the original was a hit and popular film in France, but I never mentioned my personal opinion in the mix, I guess.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Buscemi »

I must have misread that then.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Chienfantome »

Well, the most important thing is that you discovered a film you enjoyed ;)
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Chienfantome »

Last weekend I went to see two old films in theater, one I had never seen, the other I hadn't seen since my teen years.
The first is Stanley Donen's Funny Face, starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. Hepburn has always been my mom's favourite actress, and she's always loved musicals, so yes, Funny Face has always been a film she loves. And it seems my mom and I do'nt share the same taste. Funny Face is a very enjoyable film, but I can't say this is Donen's best work. Maybe because the sequences in Paris (half of the film is set there) seems a bit ridiculous for the parisian I am. And at the same time that's a part of the charm of the film, where Hepburn plays an intellectual book store clerk who gets embarked to Paris by a Fashion magazine editor and photographer to model. It was a fun little film, but nothing more to me. 6/10

Next I went to see David Lean's The Bridge over the River Kwai, a film I had seen when I was a kid, but not in the last 15 years or so. After experiencing Lawrence of Arabia in a beautiful restored copy at the French Cinemathèque last fall, I was eager to rediscover Kwai. Though it does not display the grandeur of Lawrence, Kwai is still a fantastic epic on its own, smart, adventurous, bitter. It was funny watching this huge film, and thinking we don't see Hollywood films of this ambition and scale anymore. 8/10
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by numbersix »

Geezer wrote:Killing Them Softly - F

What an awful piece of rubbish. What the hell was the point? So little happens and what does is so boring and pointless that I found my attention drifting to other things. Just a mess. I really almost shut it off, which I NEVER do. Worst film I've seen in a long time. I've never been so let down by Brad Pitt. Glad I didn't pay to see it, just used a free Red Box code. At least it was short.
Interestingly, the film I think of the most as a comparison is Pulp Fiction, as both films play around with narrative (although this does so to a lesser extent, it's more about digressions as narrative subversion) and focus on quirky dialogue. But while Tarantino's film demonstrates a love of cinema, this demonstrates an anger towards government. It's funny you ask what the point is, when my main problem was that the point was heavy-handed as almost every scene has a radio or TV in the background full of archive political speeches by Bush or Obama (and how brave it is to link the two). The film plays the story of these lowlifes as an analogy for the failure of the USA government's promises to its people. They are the "Main Street" reflection of empty promises and an utter disregard for life, evident in the film's unspoken motto that there is no more honour amongst thieves. Just look at how bureaucratic the "hit" turns out to be, and also how Pitt's "killing them softly" speech is made ironic at the film's conclusion.

It's been a long time since I've seen such an overtly political film (even overt ones like Ides of March were soft) in America, and the fury behind this was impressive.

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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by Buscemi »

When I saw Killing Them Softly in the theatre, there were a few walkouts (but not as many as the showing of Buried, in which the auditorium went from three-fourths full to half full by the midpoint).

As the politics, I didn't think the 2008 election theme overwhelmed the film. Most of the film is a very dark, brutal and nihilistic crime film (it probably has more in common with Sam Peckinpah than Jean-Luc Godard). While watching, the one film I thought of was Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
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Re: What Are You Watching Right Now? Episode 3 - Turtles in

Post by numbersix »

An interesting comparison. I think you're not far off, Boosch. Peckinpah makes very (deliberately) empty films about violence and revenge destroying itself. There's certainly an element of that in Killing Them Softly, though I think it's all for a political point. It's been a long time since I saw Cross of Iron and I wonder if that is an interesting comparison.

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