TV/Movies Megathread

[Sheilbh]

Also just saw the trailer for 12 Years A Slave. It looks outstanding.

Hunger's one of the best films I've seen and Shame was interesting, though not as great.

Edit: The trailer:
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/12yearsaslave/

[Sheilbh]

I also hate long expositions about the world's setting - just throw the viewer in there; if you can convey that info by showing, not telling, they can figure shit out by themselves.

Yep.

But I enjoyed it in the Hobbit.

I'm not a Tolkien fan. I read the Hobbit when I was a kid and liked it but never got on with Lord of the Rings (though I'm reading and enjoying it now. What I really like in the books is that because there's a substantial world behind the story he's telling the omissions and lack of background don't seem like gaps. If anything they convince you more of the world your in.

But I think that's probably because he wrote so many other things that sort-of provided the myths and history of his world. So if you're interested and patient you can go and fill those omissions in. I don't think the films would have that chance because (from what I understand) only the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are really readable, adaptable books. So it's nice for someone like me to be given that sense of the world and to fill the holes. It's nice to have it explained why Gandalf fucks off all the time, for example, or why he wants to help the dwarves.

But I think lots of films with far less substantial worlds behind them linger on setting a little too long - I think it would've been a really easy temptation for Dredd. Maybe they can do a bit more if they get to make a sequel, which I hope they will, but for now I'm really like the self-contained story in the self-contained mega-block that is ultimately over a drugs bust.

It's a bane of superhero movies. Which becomes a bit boring when a series is rebooted and they re-tread familiar ground.

Yeah. They're really vulnerable. Some of it's useful - I haven't heard of most of the characters in the whole Avengers set-up so I quite appreciate a bit of context and the stand-alone movies, providing they're good. But I think even non-superhero films seem to spend a lot of time doing flashbacks and looking for motivation and where have the character come from. If they remade Silence of the Lambs they'd have lingeringly cut back to Clarice in West Virginia (I think). I think there's maybe a superhero-isation of other films, as if every hero or antagonist needs a big back story and as if we need to know.

[CountDeMoney]

Personally, I can't wait for Robert Redford's All Is Lost

http://youtu.be/Lk_R04LfUQU

Wow.

[Ideologue]

Dredd. Very good. It pulls off the trick of making slightly schlocky violence grimly funny rather than camply funny.

Also I love a blockbuster-ish film that is around an hour and a half long and isn't mostly backstory or about 'origins'. This should be the norm again

My one major quibble is the soundtrack. Tedious atmospheric industrial, which is now as rare as Inception massed brass. I think films aren't using soundtracks very well at the minute. What worked is now a bit tedious and samey.

Funnily enough, there's Escape Plan, which I just got back from.  Sloppy in a few parts, but overall a very fun movie, and tremendously aware of its throwbackiness.  A sizeable percentage of the cuts in this movie are wipes, and it ends on a freeze frame.  I liked it a lot.  A lot more than Carrie.  A lot more than Captain Phillips, for that matter.  It's also surprisingly leftist considering the stars.

I liked the score too.  It's Elfmanesque.

Edit: Also the slo-mo bits reminded me of The Fountain, but worth watching.

Anything that recalls to mind The Fountain should be worth watching.

[Ideologue]

Personally, I can't wait for Robert Redford's All Is Lost

http://youtu.be/Lk_R04LfUQU

Wow.

Sure, but Gravity?  I DUNNO MAN COULD GO EITHER WAY

[Ideologue]

Also just saw the trailer for 12 Years A Slave. It looks outstanding.

Hunger's one of the best films I've seen and Shame was interesting, though not as great.

Edit: The trailer:
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/12yearsaslave/

To prep for 12 Years, I got Shame.  Came today and is presently sitting on my table.  A porno movie with Carey Mulligan?  Sold.

[Sheilbh]

If you've got Shame get Hunger too. It's worth it.

Trailer:
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/hunger/

Personally, I can't wait for Robert Redford's All Is Lost

Not heard of that but it looks good. The film Castaway should've been

[CountDeMoney]

Sure, but Gravity?  I DUNNO MAN COULD GO EITHER WAY

At least Redford is wearing proper protective gear.

[Ideologue]

In Shame Carey Mulligan takes her clothes off, and in Hunger someone stops eating.

If you put them together, they're basically the perfect film.

And if you put them together with 12 Years a Slave, they're CdM's perfect film.

[PRC]

What Europe needs:

http://youtu.be/UPE2ySTIGRM

Bestest show ever. And referenced by the Simpsons too.

A poor mans Monty Python skit turned into a series is what Europe needs?

[Syt]

I'm not a Tolkien fan. I read the Hobbit when I was a kid and liked it but never got on with Lord of the Rings (though I'm reading and enjoying it now. What I really like in the books is that because there's a substantial world behind the story he's telling the omissions and lack of background don't seem like gaps. If anything they convince you more of the world your in.

But I think that's probably because he wrote so many other things that sort-of provided the myths and history of his world. So if you're interested and patient you can go and fill those omissions in. I don't think the films would have that chance because (from what I understand) only the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are really readable, adaptable books. So it's nice for someone like me to be given that sense of the world and to fill the holes. It's nice to have it explained why Gandalf fucks off all the time, for example, or why he wants to help the dwarves.

I think Tolkien was great in that he (mostly) avoided a frequent pifall in sci-fi/fantasy.

World building is kind of crucial to any larger work of speculative fiction, but a lot of the details, and the better defined the world is, the more "real" it will feel. Many authors can't resist the urge to show their work - be it their snazzy starships and their weapons systems or ancient folklore of their version of dwarves, even if it doesn't advance the story, bogging down the narrative.

Tolkien mostly stayed away from that (exempting the info dump chapter at the beginning of LotR about the history of the ring and Sauron - though it made sense in the way he presented it as Gandalf telling Frodo what this was all about*). Instead the landscape is literally littered with silent witnesses of the setting (ruins mostly), that give weight and realism to the world without bogging down in endless descriptions.




* LotR starts out like The Hobbit in many ways - a journey, with episodic adventures: Getting to Bucklebury, The Old Forest, the Barrow Wight Downs, Bree, Weather Top, Moria. It's after Moria that the story becomes more complex, with the Fellowship splitting up, and the scale becomes much grander. Tolkien wrote that he took a break at the point when they were at Balin's grave in Moria (1943, he resumed writing in 1944), so I guess that serves as a "breaking point" for the story.

[Josquius]

Yeah, that was nice about him.
One thing that always bothered me about asoiaf for instance is how The plot often operates just to send characters to new places that can be shown off. It's done well and it works, but still....

[The Brain]

Saw a QI episode with Brian Blessed. I had never seen him "as himself" before and I didn't know he was always on. Jesus Christ.

[Savonarola]

Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé

Painlevé was a French director who mostly made films about aquatic life.  His best known works are probably "The Love Life of the Octopus" and "The Vampire" (the latter about vampire bats) but he made hundreds.  Some are nature documentaries meant to entertain and educate, others are serious scientific observations.  He had studied the sciences before switching to film.

The bonus disc contains a number of interviews Painlevé did for French Television.  He's a fascinating character; his father was prime minister (interestingly enough so was British filmmaker Anthony Asquith's.)  He seems to have known everyone in the French Cinema industry, Jean Vigo was his classmate, he loaned his prism to the cinematographer of Luis Buñuel's "Land without Bread" and his harness to the cinematographer of "Breathless."  He was an anarchist and managed to be fined by both the Petain and de Gaulle government.  (Painlevé may be the only anarchist ever to have his own line of jewelry.  He made jewelry with a seahorse motif after a successful short film about seahorses.)

[Josephus]

What's the original opening sequence?

Some of the other girls hazing Carrie in the locker room.

and taking their clothes off.