sarcastig

Member since 5/10/2007, last signed in awhile ago.

"As cool as a fruitstand"

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Control

Control - first thoughts
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. [What do you think?]
"Is this film gorgeous or what? What else would you expect, of course, from Anton Corbijn, who surprisingly didn't act as his own DP here. I cannot find a right picture to illustrate it, but his compositions are amazingly simple, so stark, yet they work beautifully.I almost can't believe Sam Riley is a first time actor: he's great here. I'm not even talking about the mimicry - I'm not very familiar with Joy Division and until I searched youtube fifteen minutes ago, I'd never seen Ian Curtis dance - but simply about the intensity of his portrayal, the openness, too. The tragedy of Curtis' life is that it really wasn't all that tragic, but he couldn't take it, and Riley shows us the little boy he really still was. When he was my age, he was already married, with a kid, a band to lead and a lover. All of this happened more or less impulsively. Then, when he was one year older, he had one fatal impulse.I only have one gripe, really, and it's not even the predictable rise-and-fall struct ... " [More]

Trapped

Quick Thoughts - Trapped (1949)
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"Ah, but how you can see the production code at work here. The sympathy of the film is clearly with its charming protagonist, played by Llloyd Bridges, an his smart, sexy girlfriend Meg/Laurie, but of course in the end criminals are never allowed to win. There are two great fights here, clumsy and nasty and just two bodies rolling on the floor trying to hurt each others - none of the effectiveness here of Bourne or Viggo, they don't really know how to fight, just that they want to get out looking better than the other guy.I'm not sure I liked the documentary voice-over, quite similar in fact to the one in He Walked By Night, and the end chase sequence is not all that captivating since it doesn't involve the main character, but all in all, this is a nice little noir.Image source Originally posted on:sarcastig's blog " [More]

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Top 50 - #2 - Eternal Sunshine ...
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"I have a conflicted relationship with romance, and romantic movies in particular. Thing is, I'm kind of a cynic about "Love" with a capital, yet at heart I really am hopelessly romantic. I just don't put any stock in the formulaic, by the book kind of romance movies usually serve up. I don't buy two beautiful people being meant for one another just 'cause, I don't buy big romantic gestures, and that's not even mentioning the sneaky sexism often present, with many movies operating under the assumption that the main goal in a woman's life is to find "the one".My sister suggested, yesterday, that I draw out my studies because it's in college that you have the highest probability of meeting this mysterious "one", and I don't even think she was kidding. I laughed at her, of course, and it's true: I don't make any life decisions based on how they will affect my probability of finding a mate. I don't believe there is one person out there for me who's perfect. That doesn't mean, however, t ... " [More]

Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises (Cronenberg, 2 ...
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"It's impossible to say anything remotely meaningful or interesting about this movie without mentioning the (in)famous "bathhouse scene", so I won't even try. It is amazing. It's intense, it hurts, it's repulsive, yet you can't look away. It shows both how incredibly easy to harm a human body is, how tenuous human life, and at the same time in Viggo's sinewy body it shows how lean, mean, and resilient it can be at the same time. Malleable, too: all the tattoos make his body seem something manufactured, perfected, a symbol more than anything living, breathing, feeling pain.Also, yes, he's nekkid.Unfortunately, despite a few wonderful Cronenberg touches as described above, I'm not sure this film ultimately adds up to more than just a solid genre film. It's a bit unfair, of course: coming from an unknown I might have hailed this as a very promising debut, but coming from Cronenberg, especially just after A History of Violence, how could my expectations not be unfairly high? That movie ... " [More]

The Man Who Wasn't There

Top 50 - # 3 - The Man Who Wasn ...
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"Finally then! Craig was right again.One of the best cinematic experiences I've ever had was watching The Man Who Wasn't There on the big screen, 4 years after it came out, and after two or three viewings on DVD. Roger Deakins' own print was being shown, and the man himself was in attendance. I've never seen black and white more glorious, more crisp but at the same time also oddly warm, and this screening is when my love for this film turned to adoration.Deakins also did a Q&A afterwards. I didn't really understand half of the Q's and three quarters or the A's due to all the technical lingo, but I sat there fascinated anyway because he spoke with such enthusiasm about his craft. He was impressively modest. It wasn't any sort of false humility: he knows he's good at what he does. He clearly sees what he does as a craft though, something you need some talent for but mostly a lot of experience, and there was not an ounce of pretentiousness to detect. I really think he's on the best cin ... " [More]

Hotel Chevalier

Hotel Chevalier
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"I'm never quite sure what to think about Wes Anderson. Oh, he's brilliant, especially visually, there's no debating that; unfortunately, he knows it a little too well. Still, when iTunes was being infuriatingly local last night and I was unable to download Hotel Chevalier due to being outside the US, it ruined my evening.I managed to get a version. Low quality, and I believe the beginning has been chopped off (please tell me, my version starts with Jason Schwartzman opening the door of his room), but I was very happy with it nonetheless.It's a strange little movie. It's unmistakably Anderson, from the way it's shot to the small details in the set decoration, and even in the way the two characters talk. It never quite takes off, but I was left wanting more, and that can't be a bad sign, can it? Unusually enough for Anderson, it doesn't feel like the characters' whole world is contained on screen, like all they ever were and will be is here, it feels like they are fully realized char ... " [More]

Shrek the Third

Quick thoughts - Shrek the Third
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"The Shrek sequels are surprisingly inoffensive. Yes, they lack the freshness of the original, but whereas with the bloated, convoluted Pirates sequels this bothered me to no end, the Shrek movies keep it simple and short, without any more ambition than entertaining, and in that ambition they succeed, despite a falling lpm ratio. The Shrek-based humor is quite repetitive at this point in particular, but there are lovely little visual jokes - the trees using their branches as a parachute, for instance. Also, the celebrity voices are well-cast, I especially liked that after already using John Cleese in the second movie, they now also added fellow Monty Python alum Eric Idle as a somewhat loony Merlin. The subplot about villains taking back their stories could have been more interesting and fleshed out, but it feels petty to complain about a movie that knows to stay simple, short, and light.Of course I prefer originality, daring, and so on. But for an evening like yesterday, when I was ... " [More]

The Assassination of Jesse Jame ...
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"This film's not quite the masterpiece it wants to be, but I liked it, liked it a lot even. It's a western without many of the standard elements: no shoot-outs, here, no chases on horses, no cowboy hats, even, just bowlers. It's almost as much a period drama as a western, in fact. It's a movie I'd sooner recommend to my mother than to my little brother, which you don't expect from a western.I usually hate movies that are so self-serious and solemn, but I found myself entranced by this one, its slow pace and elegiac tone, maybe because it's content not to give any straight answers. We spend a lot of time with Jesse James and Bob Ford, we get the feeling that we know them, but their precise motivation remains opaque. There are a lot of themes here, from hero worship to celebrity culture, but luckily Dominik doesn't try to convey any specific message, and the assassination of the title is left wonderfully ambigious. Some of the symbolism is heavy handed (Jesse playing with and then kil ... " [More]

Buñuel blog-a-thon: Belle de Jour
By sarcastig in As cool as a Fruitstand
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"And now, for my contribution to Flickhead's Buñuel-a-thon:The title "Belle de Jour" is a strange one, and can be interpreted in many ways. The official explanation is that a "belle de jour" is a day lily, a flower that blooms only during the day, but I always associate "Belle de jour" almost automatically with its complement, 'Laide de Nuit'. The title can be translated as "beauty of the day", but also as "beautiful by day", and thus maybe implicitly ugly by night?The interesting thing is that Séverine is a prostitute during the day, a well-mannered (though apparently frigid) BCBG woman during the night. According to the rules of society, the former is ugly, the latter "beautiful", but if you interpret the name as I do, could it not be the opposite? Might it be that Buñuel is trying to say that's it's not her work in the brothel that's wrong, her masochistic desires, but just her repression of those desires, her lies and pretense?Buñuel invites us to be a voyeur in this film, to wa ... " [More]

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