Last movie you watched?

[frankie_fan]

The Simpsons Movie on the plane to Perth. I seriously can't wait to get on DVD (unless I get it for Christmas)!

[Nathander]

Originally Posted by Mr. Marshmallow

Then your fears are severely misplaced because this film does GREAT justice to King's work, I feel though other King films have done justice but trust me, Mist is MAGNIFICENT. It's not only the best King adaptation I've ever seen, its the BEST film I have seen of all 2007. Its absolutely beautiful.

Its intense, well acted, well paced, and the ending is so freaking jaw dropping, that alone is worth seeing the film. If there is ever any film that has come out this year or any other that I feel is truly worth your hard earned cash, The Mist is certainly one of them.

The last film I saw by the way was Metropolis, the anime one naturally.

I don't doubt that, to some degree, they are. There have been a lot of movies based off King's books that have been fantastic films in there own right, but suffered fairly poorly at the task of being truthful adaptations of his work. Take Kubrick's The Shining; it deviated greatly from the original novel, but when taken on its own, it is a fantastic horror film (I would say even King's attempt at The Shining miniseries, despite being more accurate to his book, failed to capture the necessary mood Kubrick succeeded at capturing). I also forget It, which I should have mentioned earlier which was, despite being a made for TV movie two-parter, was incredibly true to King's novel while maintaining itself as a good movie on it's own right. While I'd like to see adaptations be 100% faithful, its not a necessity as long as it remains respectful to the original work and is a good film.

As for Metropolis, another example of a film that deviates highly from Tezuka's original manga, yet is a utterly fantastic, fantastic film. It is easily one of my favorite anime films of all time, along with Spirited Away by Miyazaki.

The Corpse Grinders was the last film I saw. An exploitation film from the 70s, its about a cat food company that makes its food with human corpses, which causes housecats to develop a taste for human flesh. Quite possibly one of the stupidest and most boring films I've ever seen, but I expected that; I'm just a glutton for horrid cinema.

[Partymember]

I just saw two awesome flicks:

1) Superbad saw it in theaters, got it on DVD, and it is still the funniest movie i have ever seen.

2) The Hebrew Hammer...this was a ridiculously funny movie. so great..."Shabbat Shalom..!"

oh geez...good stuff

[koosie]

Originally Posted by jekylljuice

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Yes that is a terrific film and really a worthy addition to some of the great Christmas Carols there's been. Remember the Blackadder one? That was ace, too.

The main reason that Muppet Christmas Carol stands out, even from the excellent Muppet films, is Michael Caine. He does a similar job in the last film I watched which was The Prestige on DVD. 2nd time I've seen it and while it was gripping the first time, this time is was just fun, like I was indulging myself with a big chocolate cake or something. Hats off to David Bowie as Tesla!

[jekylljuice]

Originally Posted by koosie

Yes that is a terrific film and really a worthy addition to some of the great Christmas Carols there's been. Remember the Blackadder one? That was ace, too.

The main reason that Muppet Christmas Carol stands out, even from the excellent Muppet films, is Michael Caine. He does a similar job in the last film I watched which was The Prestige on DVD. 2nd time I've seen it and while it was gripping the first time, this time is was just fun, like I was indulging myself with a big chocolate cake or something. Hats off to David Bowie as Tesla!

Blackadder's Christmas Carol (which is, of course, a complete inversion on the original story - an effective lesson upon the multiple benefits of being evil) is awesome. Michael Caine doubly so.

The last movie I watched was Blade Runner: the Final Cut, on the big screen, which was a splendid experience.

I admit that I’ve actually never seen any of the previous Blade Runner cuts before (the previous Director's Cut - with which Ridley Scott never felt entirely happy - has been rotting in my rental list for sometime), so please excuse my inability to compare. I thought the opening shots of the futuristic metropolis were absolutely beautiful, though my cinema-going companion, who is much more of an authority of this film and its various levels of existence, was a bit more nitpicky. She complained that they’d blatantly been enhanced with CGI, but in my blissful ignorance I can't say that it bothered me.

The movie itself is wonderful - gripping, sad and haunting. Aside from a couple of scenes of icky violence which had me squirming in my seat, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Damn, now I'm going to have to dig out the original Philip K. Dick novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" again, though the similarities were pretty vague. There are no sheep in Blade Runner for a start.

[Mr. Marshmallow]

Drive-Thru

Despite looking completely stupid and utterly craptacular cheap budget horror movie, this turned out to be quite entertaining. The plot was utterly ridiculous and cliche, and some of the gore looked cheesy, but oddly enough, it was a movie I enjoyed sitting through to watch.

It was about a fast food icon called Horny the clown, going on a killing spree and putting the people he killed into his hamburgers. The acting was pretty good, writing was surprisingly above the usual crap par low budget horror flicks have and even though it failed to accomplish this, it had a neat spiritual sub plot.

Unlike most D grade horror movies I've regretfully seen, this one I am glad to have watched. Its good for a laugh and for fun, don't expect anything grand out of it but I sure as Hell found it to be a good way to kill 90 minutes.

[jekylljuice]

The Golden Compass

I haven't yet picked up and read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, but then I don't think you'd have to to realise that they blatantly cut back a whole deal upon character, complexity and thematics in this adaptation. I'd be lying if I said it didn't entertain me, but more than anything it's just left me hankering to read the books, because there were so many interesting concepts and events in this film which were never explored in enough detail or ever given a particularly satisfying explanation. It's like the movie equivilent of a skim-read. I remember garnering the impression from the Lemony Snicket movie that they'd presumably rushed through a lot of the novels' extra details (which I similarly hadn't read prior to seeing the film), but I still found that movie to extremely colourful and enjoyable in its own right. Something, however, was missing here.

The CGI animals weren't particularly convincing, but you got used to them, so much so that it felt slightly disconcerting whenever a real animal appeared on the scene. I quite enjoyed Sam Elliot's contribution - thanks to the Big Lebowski, his is a face which I always find it comforting and familiar to see. But yes, overall you're left walking away with the gaping feeling that this is really a thin substitute for the books. Fortunately my brother has agreed to lend me his copies over Christmas.

[Medikor]

The Alamo movie that stars John Wayne as Davy Crockett. I've always enjoyed John Wayne movies and this is one of my favorites. The action is just great. And seeing Jim Bowie on screen makes me want to go finish cleaning the rust off of my old pioneer knife... and get a real Bowie knife.

[Ditchy McAbandonpants]

Ditto on The Golden Compass.

Like jekylljuice, I haven't yet had the time to read the His Dark Materials trilogy, but friends of mine who have were understandably keen to see the adaptation, so I went along with them as a sort of crash course, to see what the fuss was all about. Said friends seemed to get something out of the experience, in terms of seeing favourite characters and moments brought to life by the excellent cast and admirable production design (though they were disappointed with the truncated ending). I, being unable to appreciate the film on that level, instead had to judge it on its own merits as a film, and in those terms, I have to say that I thought it failed. Like, really, really badly.

If I had to illustrate concisely what I thought was wrong with the film, I would simply say this; aside from the opening and closing ten minutes, the scenes in the film could have taken place in literally any order, and it wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference to the overall meaning of the story. The Golden Compass is a film with no sense of any progression at all: there are no character arcs; there is no coherent unifying theme; there is no emotional journey; there is no sense of why any of the events taking place are even happening, much less why they are important. Instead of giving us a single, unified scenario driven forward by a cast of logically employed characters, the film instead vomits onto us a series of malformed and fundamentally disconnected mini-situations, each of which is staffed by its own set of sketchily drawn and ultimately unimportant bit-part players, who shuffle onto the screen, deliver a chunk of clunky exposition and then vanish from the film before we can engage with them either as personalities or as players in a larger scheme. The only tenuous thread that remotely holds these disparate segments together is the presence of the central character Lyra, but despite the best efforts of the likeable young Dakota Blue Richards, and despite the fact that her "rescuing her friend" storyline, flimsy and underwritten as it is, is the only thing in this film resembling a continuous plot strand, it doesn't change the fact that her "journey" has no logical structure to it, instead seeing her passively and seemingly randomly shunted around from place to person to place in a way that makes her actual progress impossible to gauge, and thus impossible to invest in.

It's a genuine shame, really, because as has been discussed at length, the source material is a veritable goldmine not only of memorable characters and wild imagination but of genuinely thought-provoking philosophical ideas, and as I mentioned before, the cast and production design is difficult to fault. The problems with this film seem to stem almost entirely from writer/director Chris Weitz, who, whilst having produced well-regarded work on smaller projects (American Pie, About A Boy), seems clearly incapable of dealing with a story of this scale, something he himself must have realised when he originally abandoned the project back in 2004; he was eventually coaxed back, and having seen the final result, I can't say I'm pleased that he was. In the context of Weitz's film, Pullman's interesting (and highly controversial) ideas are reduced to a barely intelligible footnote, whilst the A-list stars - in character terms, cast almost perfectly, so say my Dark Materials-literate friends - by and large feel totally wasted in a series of immemorable cameos. Daniel Craig, contrary to what the marketing men would have you believe, has barely ten minutes of screentime before disappearing almost completely; Christopher Lee has literally less than five seconds; and Sam Elliot and Eva Green, as the cowboy aeronaut and benevolent witch who ride to Lyra's aid in dire moments, are hamstrung by roles that feel like lazy plot devices at best, ridiculous deus ex machinas at worst. Weitz does pull one effective sequence out of the bag, the much-vaunted polar bear battle (which includes a moment of violence that, as much as they tried to sanitise it, really pushes the boundary of the PG rating), but three effective minutes out of 113 does not bode well for a would-be tentpole franchise. I'll concur with jekylljuice that watching this film does make me curious to read the source novel, but that's borne mostly of a desire to ascertain that this beloved book, by one of Britain's most acclaimed authors, is in fact better than this plodding, barely coherent CliffsNotes version makes it look.

Yeah, so, I didn't really like it. Enchanted looks quite fun, though.

[Mr. Marshmallow]

And me 3 on The Golden Compass

As in, I just got back from seeing it, and I feel pretty much the same way everyone else has on this board feels. Before I begin though I want to state honestly and quite bluntly that I do not care AT ALL how authentic or how inaccurate this movie off the book series, I judged the film on one simple rule: was it good or was it bad? Nothing else undermines my judgment.

And in the end: it was bad, pretty bad as a matter of fact. I didn't have extremely high hopes for this film nor had I known much (nor did i want to) about the books prior to the film's release. The fact of the matter is despite all the obvious lovely fantasy elements and great special effects, this film is stiff and cold as the ice the Ice bears run upon and cracking with thin threads.

Unlike previous movies such as Narnia and Harry Potter, Compass blows their first mistake by failing to do what Narnia and Potter did: integrate into this new world and give us time to really understand the logistics of it, instead we get a brief like 5 minute narration and a poor one at that of the "rules" of the world. The one rule I "did" like at first was the whole devian/demon thing.

The fact everyone's soul was embodied in a personal creature was a unique one and it helped make the world seem more original, as with their rather fantastic looking vehicles. Unfortunately, the animal gimmick becomes stupid and more or less pointless when NONE of the animals talk outside of Lyra's constantly changing Pan and the Ice bears who chat as normal as humans do.

It's a rather stupid idea, even if it was in the books, having so many animals provided great opportunities to have many different personalities by having the owners talk with their deviants, instead they do nothing more then prove to be totally useless other then squeak, chirp, and burst into a fire cracker when their owner dies. Other then that, there pretty pointless to have.

The whole story here is pretty translucent and most notably, incoherent. The only real concept here is a story about a majestic empire that is fearing of losing its power and influence by having people leave to other worlds, and this magical compass supposedly tells people's personal stories and the truth. I honestly can't explain it any better because the movie did it the same way.

The story is jumbled, confusing, and much like the dialog, stiff and lifeless which was my biggest problem: the dialog. I felt so ashamed to see talented actors like Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman waste their careers on a film with such incompetent ass writing. The dialog is completely drab and dull, there's no life behind these people's words and its rather plain and simplistic.

There's imagination everywhere else except the words the actors speak, nothing is sharp or witty or anything to quote about. Speaking of quotes, no offense to the British but their kid actors seriously need to speak a little more clearly. I couldn't understand half a word they said, it was mumbled up or using words that sounded too goofy or cluttered to understand their talking.

Far as the actors concerned, none of them are worth mentioning outside of the 2 I listed. Their below average, stiff as board, breezing through their performances with little care or effort. The whole movie ends on a completely stupid point, leaving it on a wide open cliffhanger (again I don't care if this was how the books were, its a stupid ending no matter who did it first).

The trouble is there's nothing in here that screams out "we must have MORE". This is nothing grand, no matter how much they want it to be. People complain shows or movies don't use authentic story lines from comics or novels. Well sometimes, god forbid this happens, the comic story is CRAP! Just because something comes 100% authentic from another source doesn't mean its fun to watch.

This movie could have been page by page, word for word exactly like the book and it wouldn't matter a single bit because it was NOT fun to watch. Other then a kick ass Polar bear brawl and some really neat looking vehicle designs, every other fantasy movie out there is worth seeing more then this one. Its a dry, shiny husk of a good movie with little to stand on and little to watch for.