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Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 10:23 AM
Well, theres a decent amount of good movies coming out this summer, just saw the midnight showing of pirates 3 i thought it was really good. Long as hell but it was good. On the other hand Spiderman 3, imo, was horrible.


Any one else see any new good movies?

MJZiggy
05-25-2007, 10:26 AM
I wanna see Shrek 3 with my kid. It got great reviews. Has anyone seen it?

GBRulz
05-25-2007, 11:04 AM
Shrek 3
Pirates 3
Spiderman 3

Gas $3+...... is this a trend? lol

Very rarely there I go see a movie in the theater, but I probably will go see Oceans 13 when it comes out. AKA Oceans 11 3 :wink:

HarveyWallbangers
05-25-2007, 11:10 AM
I've never seen Shrek 1, 2, or 3. I saw Pirates I, and thought it was overrated. I saw Spiderman I. I liked it, but I thought it was overrated also. I thought the Oceans 11 movies were just okay.
:D

Zool
05-25-2007, 11:21 AM
Shrek the first one is really well done. The second one had some good one liners. I've heard bad things about the 3rd.

Partial
05-25-2007, 11:27 AM
I've got a ton of movies to get caught up on, problem is they're so darn expensive.

You can see them for around 5 bucks though if you go before 5 pm. I think thats what i'll do!

HarveyWallbangers
05-25-2007, 11:33 AM
Movies are $7-8. I remember when you could go to a movie for $1-2.

LL2
05-25-2007, 11:33 AM
I want to see Pirates 3 and Spidy 3 at the theaters, but at 10 bucks a ticket and a baby due in 3 weeks I might have to pass. I like the picture on our 57” HDTV better anyways, the downside is the wait, but the pop and popcorn is cheaper too!

Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 11:37 AM
Shrek 3
Pirates 3
Spiderman 3

Gas $3+...... is this a trend? lol

Very rarely there I go see a movie in the theater, but I probably will go see Oceans 13 when it comes out. AKA Oceans 11 3 :wink:

ha yea thats another movie i cant wait for

Partial
05-25-2007, 11:38 AM
I have a hunch that out of the big sequels this summer, the third jason bourne one will be by far the best.

My reasoning for that is the story was actually written as a trilogy from the start with the books. That, and the first two were great!

Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 11:39 AM
I've never seen Shrek 1, 2, or 3. I saw Pirates I, and thought it was overrated. I saw Spiderman I. I liked it, but I thought it was overrated also. I thought the Oceans 11 movies were just okay.
:D

so what movies do u like?

LL2
05-25-2007, 11:41 AM
I have a hunch that out of the big sequels this summer, the third jason bourne one will be by far the best.

My reasoning for that is the story was actually written as a trilogy from the start with the books. That, and the first two were great!

Forgot about jason Bourne. Love the first two. His woman died in the second and he killed off the main guy in Washington. Where will the story turn to?

Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 11:45 AM
I have a hunch that out of the big sequels this summer, the third jason bourne one will be by far the best.

My reasoning for that is the story was actually written as a trilogy from the start with the books. That, and the first two were great!

Forgot about jason Bourne. Love the first two. His woman died in the second and he killed off the main guy in Washington. Where will the story turn to?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0440963/

Bourne races to discover the final mysteries of his past while a government agent tries to track him down after a shootout in Moscow.

HarveyWallbangers
05-25-2007, 11:46 AM
so what movies do u like?

Recent movies?

Movies that I liked that came out in the last 5 years or so are Lord Of The Rings, A Beautiful Mind, Garden State, The Upside Of Anger, Wedding Crashers, The Notebook, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Harry Potter.

I think the movie business is low on quality in recent years. I haven't seen many movies in the last 15 months though. Hopefully, it will rebound.

HarveyWallbangers
05-25-2007, 11:46 AM
I liked the Bourne movies.

Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 11:51 AM
Fantastic four looks pretty good

packinpatland
05-25-2007, 12:11 PM
Movies are $7-8. I remember when you could go to a movie for $1-2.

When I was a kid, we paid 25 cents on Sat. afternoon and got a two-movie matinee.
And no, these were not silent films. :lol:

packinpatland
05-25-2007, 12:12 PM
I have a hunch that out of the big sequels this summer, the third jason bourne one will be by far the best.

My reasoning for that is the story was actually written as a trilogy from the start with the books. That, and the first two were great!

Forgot about jason Bourne. Love the first two. His woman died in the second and he killed off the main guy in Washington. Where will the story turn to?

Read the books!!!

BallHawk
05-25-2007, 03:48 PM
The best movie I saw this year, in theaters, was "The Last King of Scotland." Great performance by Forest Whitacker and the story of Idi Amin is so compelling and interesting. Great movie. I recently saw "Fracture" with Anthony Hopkins, which was also a great movie. Spiderman 3 was good. Not great, but good.

I agree with Harv, however, that the movie industry is extremely poor right now. Pirates of the Caribbean is bad plot and average acting. Fantastic Four is similar. Shrek has lost the special humor that made it so good. Comedy movies are too focused on making 12-year old sex jokes then real comedy. Stuff like the Wedding Crashers and Scary Movie is just immature, teenage humor. My favorite comedy of all time is "Blazing Saddles." Mel Brooks is a humor genius. Little-Miss Sunshine was also a good comedy. However, notice how Little-Miss Sunshine wasn't made up of sex and gag jokes? That's what a good comedy is.

GoPackGo
05-25-2007, 04:09 PM
Movies I liked recently...
the Illusionist
the Guardian
Invincible
Walk the Line
the new James Bond movie
The pursuit of happiness

GrnBay007
05-25-2007, 04:23 PM
Will Smith was great in The Pursuit of Happiness.

The Guardian was good too. There have been a few duds, but I like most of Kevin Costner's movies.

HarveyWallbangers
05-25-2007, 04:26 PM
I liked the Pursuit of Happyness. Will might not be the best actor in the family anymore.
:D

GrnBay007
05-25-2007, 04:28 PM
I liked the Pursuit of Happyness. Will might not be the best actor in the family anymore.
:D

??

Was the kid in that movie is real son?

BallHawk
05-25-2007, 04:30 PM
I liked the Pursuit of Happyness. Will might not be the best actor in the family anymore.
:D

??

Was the kid in that movie is real son?

Yeah. That was his son, Jayden.

GrnBay007
05-25-2007, 04:31 PM
I liked the Pursuit of Happyness. Will might not be the best actor in the family anymore.
:D

??

Was the kid in that movie is real son?

Yeah. That was his son, Jayden.

wow, he was good!!

BallHawk
05-25-2007, 04:47 PM
Yeah, kid's got talent for only being 9.

Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 05:10 PM
Movies I liked recently...
the Illusionist
the Guardian
Invincible
Walk the Line
the new James Bond movie
The pursuit of happiness

saw all of those and liked them

Charles Woodson
05-25-2007, 05:11 PM
Movies are $7-8. I remember when you could go to a movie for $1-2.

When I was a kid, we paid 25 cents on Sat. afternoon and got a two-movie matinee.
And no, these were not silent films. :lol:

thats why sites like these http://www.tv-links.co.uk/index.do/4 are so great

packinpatland
05-26-2007, 08:12 AM
Movies are $7-8. I remember when you could go to a movie for $1-2.

When I was a kid, we paid 25 cents on Sat. afternoon and got a two-movie matinee.
And no, these were not silent films. :lol:

thats why sites like these http://www.tv-links.co.uk/index.do/4 are so great

Thanks! There is so much out there I don't know about!

MJZiggy
05-27-2007, 12:04 PM
Shrek the first one is really well done. The second one had some good one liners. I've heard bad things about the 3rd.

If you liked the first and the second, you will like the third. The movie got applause in the theater at several points and applause at the credits (I'm not sure who they were applauding, but I don't think it was the projectionist...) There were also the usual laugh out loud scenes and those that went over the kids' heads...

HarveyWallbangers
05-27-2007, 12:08 PM
I saw The Departed last night. Pretty good movie.

packinpatland
05-27-2007, 12:15 PM
I saw The Departed last night. Pretty good movie.

Refresh my memory, was anyone still alive at the end?

HarveyWallbangers
05-27-2007, 12:18 PM
Mark Wahlberg.

packinpatland
05-27-2007, 12:21 PM
It was a good movie, I felt completely 'drained' at the end tho.

BallHawk
05-27-2007, 01:53 PM
Anybody see Children of Men? Rented it last night. Damn, that was a freaky movie. Good, nonetheless.

Scott Campbell
05-27-2007, 05:22 PM
Took the kids to Pirates 3 today. Two thumbs down here.

packinpatland
05-27-2007, 05:25 PM
Took the kids to Pirates 3 today. Two thumbs down here.

Is that your vote or the kids?

Charles Woodson
05-27-2007, 07:40 PM
Took the kids to Pirates 3 today. Two thumbs down here.

question, why didnt you like it? and have you seen the first 2? The action was great, but the script wasnt written very well

Charles Woodson
05-27-2007, 07:41 PM
I saw The Departed last night. Pretty good movie.

Yea i agree, that was a great movie. Also 300 was amazing.

Scott Campbell
05-28-2007, 09:17 AM
Took the kids to Pirates 3 today. Two thumbs down here.

question, why didnt you like it? and have you seen the first 2? The action was great, but the script wasnt written very well


The kids didn't like it either PIP.

We had all seen the first 2. The plot seemed meandering and pointless. I grow tired of swashbuckling after the first 30 fights or so. If they're going to make a lousy movie, they could at least keep it well under 2 hours.

BallHawk
05-28-2007, 09:36 AM
The action was great, but the script wasnt written very well

Unfortunately, that's a trend that is becoming too common for directors, nowadays. Too much action, not enough script. Look at the greatest films of all time: Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai, etc. None of them were full with guns and bloodshed and special effects. They all had solid plots. I hardly go to the movies that much because there's hardly anything to watch. It's either cheap teen horror flicks, lame comedies, or gore fests. Is this to say a movie can't have gore to make it good? Of course not. In my mind, though, plot before action.

Partial
05-28-2007, 09:48 AM
Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie ever.

HarveyWallbangers
05-28-2007, 09:56 AM
Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie ever.

Agreed. Casablanca was one of the best.

Charles Woodson
05-28-2007, 11:30 AM
or gore fests. Is this to say a movie can't have gore to make it good? Of course not. In my mind, though, plot before action.

yea i agree, but movies like 300 were great with all of that gore.

BallHawk
05-28-2007, 12:38 PM
Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie ever.

I can understand why some people think that. I don't think that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever, but I do believe it is one of the best. The movie industry would be much different today if it wasn't for Citizen Kane. Single-shot sequences was one of the big things CK introduced to main stream movies.

BallHawk
05-28-2007, 12:39 PM
or gore fests. Is this to say a movie can't have gore to make it good? Of course not. In my mind, though, plot before action.

yea i agree, but movies like 300 were great with all of that gore.

300 felt like the same 10 minute tape running over and over again for 2 hours. Jump in the air, stab, blood, shout, repeat.....

GBRulz
06-08-2007, 08:23 PM
I was checking out new movies coming out this week. I'm hoping to get to see Ocean's 13 this weekend. It's rare that I actually go to a movie as I'll just wait for them to come out on DVD, but I love Danny's boys !!

Also checked out other new releases...one of them looked very disturbing, "Hostel, II".

Iron Mike
06-08-2007, 09:34 PM
Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie ever.

Agreed. Casablanca was one of the best.

This one's the best:

http://www.kinoart.net/layout/data/9461.jpg

BallHawk
06-08-2007, 10:51 PM
Bicycle Thief is definitely one of the greats. A classic.

Charles Woodson
06-08-2007, 11:51 PM
Saw oceans 13 tonight, it was pretty good. But i can see if you dont understand it. But it made me laugh

packinpatland
06-09-2007, 04:42 PM
Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie ever.

Agreed. Casablanca was one of the best.

This one's the best:

http://www.kinoart.net/layout/data/9461.jpg

I hate admitting it, but I've never heard of this film. When was it filmed?

BallHawk
06-09-2007, 04:48 PM
I hate admitting it, but I've never heard of this film. When was it filmed?

It was filmed in 1948. It was originally Italian.

packinpatland
06-09-2007, 04:50 PM
I Googled it and found this, I'm renting it this weekend.
Thanks for the tip.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/trailers-screenplay-E12893-10-2

Fosco33
06-09-2007, 05:30 PM
Knocked Up was hilarious :lol:

packinpatland
06-09-2007, 05:36 PM
I've seen the trailers and it does look funny and the reviews haven't been bad but...................................I hate the title!!!

oregonpackfan
06-09-2007, 10:01 PM
My wife and oldest daughter(19) both loved Knocked up. It sounds like a chick flick type of movie.

MJZiggy
06-09-2007, 10:34 PM
I just got back from it and my friend and I agreed, the funny parts were really funny, but it was a bit long and the not funny parts really fell flat. She thought it was too crude to be a good chick flick but too much chick stuff to be appealing to the guys.

Iron Mike
06-10-2007, 10:02 PM
Bicycle Thief is definitely one of the greats. A classic.

Here....you can watch one of my favorites to watch with my daughter when she was young:

Le Ballon Rouge pt I (http://youtube.com/watch?v=SGgX212Pn7A)
Le Ballon Rouge pt II (http://youtube.com/watch?v=nN5FWShLAwE)
Le Ballon Rouge pt III (http://youtube.com/watch?v=cmQJxIy7HOI)
Le Ballon Rouge pt IV (http://youtube.com/watch?v=pPoc9Jtx8YE)

Charles Woodson
07-06-2007, 09:40 AM
BTW, For any of you who love action movies, Live Free Die Hard was the a close 2nd best movie ive seen all summer. Transformers edged it out with a smoking hot chick

LL2
07-06-2007, 10:27 AM
I haven't gone out and seen any movies all summer. Have two kids 2 and under will have something to do with that. At the same time paying $10 a movie in our area plays a small role too. I do want to hit the drive in this summer - hopefully.

LL2
07-06-2007, 10:41 AM
BTW, For any of you who love action movies, Live Free Die Hard was the a close 2nd best movie ive seen all summer. Transformers edged it out with a smoking hot chick

I just checked the website for the local drive in and they have both Live Free and Transformers there this weekend. Since the shows do not start until it gets dark we can get the kids to sleep in the back while we watch the shows. Have any veteran parents tried that?

GBRulz
07-06-2007, 10:55 AM
This isn't really a summer movie, at least not this year, but a couple nights ago "Cars" was playing on one of the Starz channels. It was so good but I fell asleep before it ended. Sounds like an oxy-moron, I know...but TV puts me to sleep!! Anyhow, now I'm scrambling to find out when it will be on again! I might have to go rent it.

Watched Alpha Dog on PPV recently, it was ok. True story which made it interesting.

BallHawk
06-01-2008, 10:20 PM
One year bump.

Partial
06-02-2008, 12:56 PM
The Dark Knight. I imagine it will be the biggest (or at least the best) movie of the summer.

GoPackGo
06-02-2008, 01:00 PM
"There will be blood"
http://unpresentable.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/therewillbeblood1.jpg

I watched it off of pay per view HD (directv)this weekend and it is a good one! (2.5 hrs long)

BallHawk
06-02-2008, 01:12 PM
Yeah, GPG, it's a great film. It's a shame it didn't get Best Picture at the Oscars, it deserved it. PT Anderson is a fantastic director and Lewis and Dano both carried the film.

GoPackGo
06-02-2008, 01:17 PM
Yeah, GPG, it's a great film. It's a shame it didn't get Best Picture at the Oscars, it deserved it. PT Anderson is a fantastic director and Lewis and Dano both carried the film.

I'm an oil man and this is a family business. Meet my son H.W. :satan:

BallHawk
06-02-2008, 05:04 PM
I am the Third Revelation!

PackFan#1
06-03-2008, 12:49 AM
X-Files: I Want to Believe 7-25-08

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d1/XFiles2Poster.jpg

PackFan#1
06-03-2008, 12:53 AM
Dumbfuck Mountain. Release date: Movie is currently censored by Bush Administration

http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/S/k/bush_dumbfmntn.jpg

Freak Out
06-06-2008, 06:40 PM
Is anyone else going to go see the latest from Argento "The mother of tears"?

Tyrone Bigguns
06-06-2008, 06:57 PM
I saw the best comedy of the year. Indiana Jones.

I laughed the whole time...don't think i was laughing at the intended moments though.

Freak Out
06-06-2008, 06:59 PM
I saw the best comedy of the year. Indiana Jones.

I laughed the whole time...don't think i was laughing at the intended moments though.

That bad eh?

Tyrone Bigguns
06-06-2008, 07:25 PM
I saw the best comedy of the year. Indiana Jones.

I laughed the whole time...don't think i was laughing at the intended moments though.

That bad eh?

I thought it was terrible. The last movie that provoked such inappropriate laughter was Van Helsing.

Not my choice...the woman's. She is die hard Indiana Jones fan. She left the theater cursing lucas and spielberg.

Come to think of it..Van Helsing was also a woman's choice. I think there is a lesson there.... :roll:

oregonpackfan
06-06-2008, 08:42 PM
I saw the best comedy of the year. Indiana Jones.

I laughed the whole time...don't think i was laughing at the intended moments though.

That bad eh?

Though the special effects and the action scenes were entertaining, I had to keep rolling my eyes how Jones could survive all the calamatous events. Even a well-trained athlete should have died 25 times in that movie.

During one part of the movie, Indiana Jones and his party of 5 went over three successive waterfalls in a row. Each was at least 100 feet high. Surprisingly, all 5 of them survived the adventure without a scratch! :roll:

Tyrone Bigguns
06-06-2008, 08:58 PM
I saw the best comedy of the year. Indiana Jones.

I laughed the whole time...don't think i was laughing at the intended moments though.

That bad eh?

Though the special effects and the action scenes were entertaining, I had to keep rolling my eyes how Jones could survive all the calamatous events. Even a well-trained athlete should have died 25 times in that movie.

During one part of the movie, Indiana Jones and his party of 5 went over three successive waterfalls in a row. Each was at least 100 feet high. Surprisingly, all 5 of them survived the adventure without a scratch! :roll:

Interesting..i found those to be the most plausible. :roll:

Freak Out
06-07-2008, 01:04 AM
Is anyone else going to go see the latest from Argento "The mother of tears"?

I know my wife won't go within 10 miles of the theater that is showing this but I have a friend who can see past the gore and revel in the true cinematic brilliance.

Beauty, Brutality and Three Tough Mothers
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

FOR nearly 40 years Dario Argento, the so-called Italian Hitchcock, has had blood on his hands: deliberately, unashamedly, darn near literally. When a deranged killer stabs, slashes, throttles, garrotes or otherwise violates the corporal integrity of a screaming victim in one of Mr. Argento’s films — this happens with some frequency — the hands inside the black gloves have traditionally been those of the director himself. (It’s his version of the Hitchcock cameo.)

The hands may be the same, but the blood has changed a bit over the years, from the bright comic-book red of his early thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” (1970) and “Deep Red” (1975), in which the vital substance is roughly the color of maraschino cherries, to the dark, almost black stuff that gushes so freely in his latest film, “Mother of Tears” (opening Friday).

It’s never quite the color of real blood, though, which is, for the sanity of the viewer, fortunate, and is also perfectly consistent with Mr. Argento’s aesthetic: his brutal and often beautiful movies touch reality very lightly, if at all. “Mother of Tears” is one of a small minority of his films in which the agencies of evil are supernatural, explicitly unreal. The movie is the long-delayed — and, for many of his fans, breathlessly anticipated — conclusion to a kind of trilogy begun in “Suspiria” (1977), continued in “Inferno” (1980) and then, for 28 years, apparently abandoned.

In the earlier films the audience learned of the existence of three powerful witches: Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, who wreaks havoc in a German ballet academy in “Suspiria”; Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, who cranks up the stress on the already jittery New Yorkers of “Inferno”; and Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, briefly glimpsed in “Inferno” as a voluptuous, smoky-eyed temptress, waiting patiently, it appears, for just the right opportunity to lure Rome to its doom.

She gets her chance in “Mother of Tears,” though she seems to have evolved in the intervening years into something more like Mater Pectorum: a bare-bosomed vamp commanding a coven of comparably endowed and similarly undressed young women. It’s apocalypse, Italian style. The red-hot Mater here may remind some viewers of the lusty villainesses Barbara Steele used to play with such regal tawdriness in a previous era of lurid Italian shockers — pictures like “Black Sunday” (1960), whose director, Mario Bava, contributed special effects to Mr. Argento’s “Inferno.” (It was the last film Mr. Bava worked on.)

This national tradition of dubiously tasteful screen horror is clearly a much stronger influence on Mr. Argento than the acknowledged source of the three-mothers concept, which is, of all things, the writings of the great Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey, author of “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821). In his sequel to that work, “Suspiria de Profundis” (published 24 years later), De Quincey describes an opium dream in which these three women, whom he calls “Our Ladies of Sorrow,” appear to him, but — maybe it’s just an Englishman’s reticence — he doesn’t say a word about the grisly skills they display in Mr. Argento’s trilogy: impalement, decapitation, disembowelment, eye gouging. And he doesn’t even mention their breasts.

Making fun of this sort of ripe, over-the-top horror isn’t difficult: it’s impaling fish in a barrel. What’s tougher to account for in Mr. Argento’s work is the often extraordinary grace of his filmmaking, which shows itself in the long, tense intervals between outbursts of stomach-turning gore. He’s both a sensationalist and a sensualist, and the line that separates Argento the showman from Argento the artist is razor thin.

In “Mother of Tears,” for instance, the prelude to the big, orgiastic climax is a remarkable sequence in which the heroine, Sarah Mandy (played by his daughter Asia Argento, who has starred in two of his previous films), explores an apparently abandoned villa, searching for the witches’ lair, and Mr. Argento treats himself to a three- or four-minute Steadicam tracking shot of thrilling complexity: the camera follows Ms. Argento up and down stairs, through delicate variations of light and shadow, and the effect is so lovely, you almost forget to be frightened.

Or rather, you remember why you allow yourself, against your better judgment, to be frightened again and again by this problematic, profoundly contradictory artist. The instruments of death his movies favor are sharp: like the Surrealists, he traffics in the more intimate, close-up forms of violence, the Buñuelian menace of knives and razors. (Guns don’t interest him at all.) And the pleasures his silky technique provides can be just as acute.

Mr. Argento, 67, has devoted most of his career to the Italian suspense genre known as giallo, which designates a kind of hyperbolic serial-killer mystery, generally with urban settings and disturbingly creative murders. (The word giallo means yellow, and refers to the covers of a popular series of paperback thrillers published by Mondadori.) Although “Suspiria,” his sixth feature, was an enormous hit, and one of his most striking exercises in style, he has nonetheless continued in the 30 years since to stick pretty closely to the nonsupernatural giallo form and its more mundane manifestations of wild, destructive unreason. There’s horror enough to be had in this world without invoking any other.

And maybe more to the point, the genre lets Mr. Argento do what he does best, which is stylizing reality, turning the everyday strange. All his best gialli, like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Tenebre” (1982), which are set in Rome, and “Deep Red,” which takes place in Turin, are distinguished by his lively appreciation of urban geography: the fearsome emptiness of nighttime plazas, the rustling ominousness of parks. The apartments his characters live in tend to be modern looking, angular, with long corridors that muffle the sounds of intruders and that take some courage to negotiate in the dark. One character in “Mother of Tears” says of Rome, “The city is 2,700 years old, and we are standing on five layers of graves.” But even when there are no witches around, no ghosts rising from the catacombs, Mr. Argento’s cities seem to quiver with the presence of the dead.

So supernatural entities, however buxom, are sort of coals to Newcastle for his brand of horror. What matters in an Argento picture is the geometry of dread, the weird thrill of looking at familiar places through the magnifying lens of fear, which heightens perceptions and sometimes — before the worst happens and the world blacks out — makes everything keenly beautiful.

It’s no accident that the most memorable scenes in Dario Argento’s movies are often those that involve stalking, the slow-motion pursuit of a victim by his (or more commonly, her) killer, because he uses these little danses macabres to lay out, stage by agonizing stage, the progress of awareness on the part of the stalkee: the dawning suspicion that something is different, wrong, then the sharp certainty, then the fast calculation of the possibilities of escape, and finally the awful clarity of resignation.

There’s a wonderful sequence of this sort in Mr. Argento’s most recent big-screen giallo, “The Card Player” (2003), which is included (along with “Tenebre” and three lesser gialli) in a DVD box set just released by Anchor Bay. The movie’s heroine, a policewoman played by Stefania Rocca, is alone in her house when she notices a figure — one staring eye in a black-masked face — reflected in a glass bowl on her coffee table. An elegantly choreographed cat-and-mouse game follows, moving in and out of the house, the hunter and the hunted changing roles once, twice, then again, much of the action occurring in dim light or full darkness, the restlessly tracking camera searching for a silhouette against a window or an open door.

That sequence doesn’t conclude with a death, but many of Mr. Argento’s virtuoso stalker set pieces do, gruesomely. As with the movies of Brian De Palma — whose 1980 “Dressed to Kill” is an American giallo, a near-homage to Mr. Argento — the violence can be a sticking point (so to speak) for viewers who might otherwise enjoy the precision and the sheer sensual exuberance of the filmmaking. (Others, of course, prize the gore above all else, but it’s probably not a good idea to sit too close to them.) And that reservation about, or even revulsion at, Mr. Argento’s work may have more validity than it does in the case of Mr. De Palma, because there is no single film in Mr. Argento’s body of work that has the coherence and aesthetic self-sufficiency of Mr. De Palma’s “Blow Out” (1981), nothing that compels a reasonably thoughtful viewer to believe that the end really justifies the queasy means.

But there’s also a stubborn kind of integrity in Mr. Argento’s refusal to look beyond the immediate, moment-to-moment sensations movies can supply, his persistent avoidance of anything approaching a meaning. (It stalks him, but he always gets away.) He isn’t, as some have charged, a sadist: he’s too detached. He may be a nihilist. What he is most fundamentally, I think, is a serial hands-on aesthete. And there’s nothing scarier than that.

3irty1
06-07-2008, 06:06 AM
I saw the best comedy of the year. Indiana Jones.

I laughed the whole time...don't think i was laughing at the intended moments though.

That bad eh?

Though the special effects and the action scenes were entertaining, I had to keep rolling my eyes how Jones could survive all the calamatous events. Even a well-trained athlete should have died 25 times in that movie.

During one part of the movie, Indiana Jones and his party of 5 went over three successive waterfalls in a row. Each was at least 100 feet high. Surprisingly, all 5 of them survived the adventure without a scratch! :roll:

Interesting..i found those to be the most plausible. :roll:

Yeah no kidding. And I still want to know how it got such great reviews. Ballhawk liked it though.

BallHawk
06-07-2008, 07:42 AM
Yeah no kidding. And I still want to know how it got such great reviews. Ballhawk liked it though.

You must be confusing me with somebody else. After seeing the comments of the people on here and other places on the internet I've decided to stay clear of the movie. :D

3irty1
06-07-2008, 09:13 AM
Yeah no kidding. And I still want to know how it got such great reviews. Ballhawk liked it though.

You must be confusing me with somebody else. After seeing the comments of the people on here and other places on the internet I've decided to stay clear of the movie. :D

Whoops sorry. Someone else on here said they liked it. Maybe even TWO people.

Freak Out
06-07-2008, 10:49 AM
Yeah no kidding. And I still want to know how it got such great reviews. Ballhawk liked it though.

You must be confusing me with somebody else. After seeing the comments of the people on here and other places on the internet I've decided to stay clear of the movie. :D

Whoops sorry. Someone else on here said they liked it. Maybe even TWO people.

Witch hunt. :lol:

Partial
06-16-2008, 12:23 AM
The Incredible Hulk was awesome. IMO it was the best of the Marvel movies so far, and 2nd best comic book behind Batman Begins.

Though the fighting scenes were a bit much, I really like Edward Norton and I think they played up the loneliness angle very well. I especially enjoyed the last few scenes.