viewing/reading for the weekend.
Sep. 22nd, 2000 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scottobearSomething to match my mood. I'm thinking of something paranormal, creepy to help with the 1930s weirdness game (not all reviews mine... culled from my database of 'to be watched')
The Exorcist
One honest-to-God-with-a-capital-G scary movie, and not just because you've got grue and gore. It's scary because it violates your sense of what's natural. Plus, I respect the ending.
Reservoir Dogs
A movie spilling over with character and dialogue.
Jacob's Ladder
I said The Exorcist was a scary movie, but even that didn't freak me out like Jacob's Ladder. It's a movie that makes you afraid to be alive.
Dead Ringers
Jeremy Irons plays psychotic twin gynecologists. This movie has no paranormal elements, and it's gobs weirder than most horror movies. Based on a true story. (Not a date movie.)
Dead Again
- just great.
Angel Heart
Good paranormal detective story, and DeNiro was spot on.
Lord of Illusions
Wow, did they ever misuse Scott Bakula in this one! Still, in its basic precept it's very close to what's going on in Unknown Armies. got to be sure to get the director's cut--not so much for the "aorta-cam" scene but for about thirty seconds when the reactivated cultists butcher their families before going off to see the wizard.
The Killer
John Woo's masterpiece of violence and melodrama. Again, no paranormal elements, except for Chow Yun-Fat's unearthly coolness.
Fargo
A brilliant portrait of the kind of stumbling, directionless, short-sighted folks who make up at least 80% of the criminal class (and probably a large section of most other classes as well).
Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart & Lost Highway
The Element of Crime
Director Lars von Trier's debut feature, this is a beautifully filmed look at madness and murder set within a vaguely post-apocalypse Europe where it is always night and usually raining. An exiled cop is recalled from Egypt — where the desert is devouring Cairo — to Germany, where a psychopath is murdering young girls selling lottery tickets. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, the cop seeks to adopt the mindset of the murderer in order to catch him. Stunning visuals that recall Blade Runner in their power and uniqueness, only using mud and crumbling buildings instead of cyclopic skyscrapers.
The Exorcist III
Having seen the first, you should skip the second and go straight to the third, written and directed by original Exorcist novelist William Peter Blatty from his own novel (Legion). It's a beautiful piece of work with some amazing imagery and chilling scenes, despite a few letdowns in the climax.
Heat
Writer/director Michael Mann presents a textbook example of solid plotting in this three-hour L.A. crime drama. He moves masterfully between amazing shootouts, tech-talky plans for elaborate heists, credible police procedurals, and harrowing family dramas in a way that every GM should study. It's like half a season of Hill Street Blues or Homicide in one movie. I've watched this flick maybe a half-dozen times now and it's still an education in effective storytelling.
The Kingdom I & II
Lars von Trier returns with a nine-hour Danish television mini-series released as two feature films abroad. At a prestigous hospital in Copenhagen, a door to the spirit world is opening and all hell is breaking loose. Brilliantly melds a traditional ghost story with Twin Peaks-style bizarro humor and jaw-droppingly scary revelations into a work like nothing else on this globe of earth.
Stalker
From the late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky comes this curious mix of science fiction and philosophy. A restricted Zone within the Soviet Union — where a meteor hit years before — contains, at the heart of its abandoned industrial wasteland, a room where your deepest wish comes true. A writer and a professor hire a Stalker to guide them through the Zone to the room at its heart. The Zone proves dangerous, with its own set of rules and traps that function on metaphysical principles rather than physical ones. A dreamlike, haunting film. (sphere tried this, and failed.)
The Exorcist
One honest-to-God-with-a-capital-G scary movie, and not just because you've got grue and gore. It's scary because it violates your sense of what's natural. Plus, I respect the ending.
Reservoir Dogs
A movie spilling over with character and dialogue.
Jacob's Ladder
I said The Exorcist was a scary movie, but even that didn't freak me out like Jacob's Ladder. It's a movie that makes you afraid to be alive.
Dead Ringers
Jeremy Irons plays psychotic twin gynecologists. This movie has no paranormal elements, and it's gobs weirder than most horror movies. Based on a true story. (Not a date movie.)
Dead Again
- just great.
Angel Heart
Good paranormal detective story, and DeNiro was spot on.
Lord of Illusions
Wow, did they ever misuse Scott Bakula in this one! Still, in its basic precept it's very close to what's going on in Unknown Armies. got to be sure to get the director's cut--not so much for the "aorta-cam" scene but for about thirty seconds when the reactivated cultists butcher their families before going off to see the wizard.
The Killer
John Woo's masterpiece of violence and melodrama. Again, no paranormal elements, except for Chow Yun-Fat's unearthly coolness.
Fargo
A brilliant portrait of the kind of stumbling, directionless, short-sighted folks who make up at least 80% of the criminal class (and probably a large section of most other classes as well).
Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart & Lost Highway
The Element of Crime
Director Lars von Trier's debut feature, this is a beautifully filmed look at madness and murder set within a vaguely post-apocalypse Europe where it is always night and usually raining. An exiled cop is recalled from Egypt — where the desert is devouring Cairo — to Germany, where a psychopath is murdering young girls selling lottery tickets. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, the cop seeks to adopt the mindset of the murderer in order to catch him. Stunning visuals that recall Blade Runner in their power and uniqueness, only using mud and crumbling buildings instead of cyclopic skyscrapers.
The Exorcist III
Having seen the first, you should skip the second and go straight to the third, written and directed by original Exorcist novelist William Peter Blatty from his own novel (Legion). It's a beautiful piece of work with some amazing imagery and chilling scenes, despite a few letdowns in the climax.
Heat
Writer/director Michael Mann presents a textbook example of solid plotting in this three-hour L.A. crime drama. He moves masterfully between amazing shootouts, tech-talky plans for elaborate heists, credible police procedurals, and harrowing family dramas in a way that every GM should study. It's like half a season of Hill Street Blues or Homicide in one movie. I've watched this flick maybe a half-dozen times now and it's still an education in effective storytelling.
The Kingdom I & II
Lars von Trier returns with a nine-hour Danish television mini-series released as two feature films abroad. At a prestigous hospital in Copenhagen, a door to the spirit world is opening and all hell is breaking loose. Brilliantly melds a traditional ghost story with Twin Peaks-style bizarro humor and jaw-droppingly scary revelations into a work like nothing else on this globe of earth.
Stalker
From the late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky comes this curious mix of science fiction and philosophy. A restricted Zone within the Soviet Union — where a meteor hit years before — contains, at the heart of its abandoned industrial wasteland, a room where your deepest wish comes true. A writer and a professor hire a Stalker to guide them through the Zone to the room at its heart. The Zone proves dangerous, with its own set of rules and traps that function on metaphysical principles rather than physical ones. A dreamlike, haunting film. (sphere tried this, and failed.)
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movies
Date: 2000-09-22 10:32 pm (UTC)Dead Again now that totally ruled! I didn't get it until just when "they" wanted you to "get it". What a great movie.
mmmmmmmmmmmm Michael Mannnnn.
Re: movies
Date: 2000-09-22 10:35 pm (UTC)Re: movies
Date: 2000-09-23 09:37 pm (UTC)really...
Date: 2000-09-23 09:47 pm (UTC)The Kingdom
Date: 2000-09-23 08:46 am (UTC)The Kingdom I and II are hilarious and scary.
The doctors are mad, mad, mad.
I'm sorry I missed The Element of Crime, have only seen the bloody bungee jumping scenes from it.
Von Trier made another film which I now can't recall the title of, but which entails Von Trier and buddies trying to make a film of a plague infested town. The scenes of this imaginary film within the film are twistedly funny.
Nice film list.
-Joachim.
Re: The Kingdom