Media itt: movie/film discussion - Beware Spoilers

[vonFiedler]

#192: The Grand Budapest Hotel
This is the only Wes Anderson film on the list, which seems strange to me. It's also only the second film of his that I've seen, and I definitely need to change that. I realize that the reputation he has is that of a hipsterish white goofball, but I think he hits a large combination of high marks that I can't say about many directors. He's uniquely visual in how he tells his stories. Most of what goes into his films is told through clever framing and subtle visual subtext (which contrasts well with unsubtle humor). This allows for a brisk pace, so that people who are really paying attention will get a lot out of the movies, and those who aren't won't be bored.

The movies demand to be analyzed with their bold and intelligent structures. For instance, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a movie about a woman reading an autobiography by an author telling a story about how he once met a man who tells him another story, that being what is prominently featured in the trailers for the film. In literature, this technique is fucking clutch. And the layers allow for multiple endings, satisfying and depressing. Though I found the happy ending to be rushed and simplistic, while the sad one really worked. Maybe that's the point though? You spend the movie hoping for a happy ending, and you get it, but in life there are no endings, and things aren't always happy.

One might take issue with the absurd humor, at least if we're really going to suggest that Wes Anderson is one of the best artists in the industry. But don't forget a little poet once upon a time who filled his works with fart jokes, you might have heard of him, named William Shakesman? The bard became an icon by making works that literally anyone could enjoy (which is quite different from the more common economic goal of making things that appeal to the largest demographic possible). Wes Anderson's visual poetry is as on-point as any iambic pentameter. And y'know, I don't think that William Shakespeare is the greatest artist ever or anything, and Wes Anderson is a guy I need more experience with, so take this all with a grain of salt. I'm just saying the comparison is there, and it's hardly insulting.

#193: Amores Perros
Now as far what most critics think, Alejandro G. Iñárritu is probably the biggest film darling at the moment. He's made a thematic trilogy. He employs unconventional and bold film techniques. And he goes fucking hard. He's also a two-time best director winner, along with best movie in 2014. He managed to make Leo a best actor. And he's a foreigner. The Revenant also scored him major points with bill and bo average joe. This is a man who can only go up, and while he only has two movies on the list (Birdman fell off), I'm certain there will be more.

But Amores Perros is a hard movie for me to rate. It's the most uncomfortable horror movie I've ever seen. Well, maybe it's not a horror movie, but I'm not sure other dog lovers will be able to tell the difference either, and I couldn't recommend it to any of them to be honest. Again, fucking hard. It's not like the movie shows a contempt for a dogs. They play a major thematic role, and are (spoilers not spoilers) meant to represent their owner's journeys and internal suffering.

Amores Perros is an ugly fucking movie. No one is really a good or even likeable person at all, maybe until the end, but that's also when things get the fucking hardest. But it's a smart movie. Interesting how I've been encountering so many thinky movies here near the bottom of the list. Amores Perros has three stories loosely connected around a car crash, which is also basically what 21 Grams and Babel (sans car crash) are. And that's okay because it's a trilogy? I don't know. I may need to see the other two.

 

[begin again]

watched the neon demon and i was mesmerized by it. yeah, it was pretentious and was all about style over substance, but this is refn we're talking about and it was still gorgeous to look at, had solid acting, and the score was just<3

 

[Matthew]

I personally think of the Grand Budapest Hotel in a more, strictly personal manner than others probably see it. I work in, what is reminiscent of, a fine dining restaurant. There are rules which are supposed to be followed.

When I watched this film it only brought sadness to my heart as I work with a 60+ year old man that has only waited tables professionally for most of his life. When I watch this film I see nothing but a profession, which used to be regarded as a skilled job, handed down to people my age (I need to express I'm a wonderful restaurant worker) being completely destroyed by modern culture.

Anderson almost makes up for that fact by a cake that is too beautiful to destroy, but it ends up with a man of apparent class and professionalism being literally thrown out because he no longer fits in societal norms. vonFiedler

Edit:
You should check out the Darjeeling Limited

 

[TheValkyries]

Finding Dory was aight I guess.

 

[vonFiedler]

#193: Million Dollar Baby
It's the movie so impossible to talk about without spoilers that the ending has already been ruined for literally everyone.

This film had its ups and downs for me. For being after Unforgiven and before Gran Torino, this Clint Eastwood film feels surprisingly amateurish. The acting is bad from everyone. The dialogue is clunky. The narration is forced (it works cause it's Morgan Freeman you say except that it doesn't). The conservative bent is not as charming as it is in other Eastwood films. The fat welfare abusing family is cartoonish in how unlikeable they are. And the boxing is pretty bad. Training fundamentals are wrong. Rules are ignored. Nothing makes the fighter special enough that we can believe that she's a contender at 32, except that she can knock opponents out too quickly, which the movie even acknowledges is not a good trait but she keeps doing it anyway and forgets that no one wants to schedule a fight with her (cause that's a factor) when she goes up in weight class (and fuck if I could tell if she actually put on weight).

spoilers

So she gets her neck broken in a fight and her trainer kills her at her request. This is not supposed to be all that sad, except maybe for the trainer who has to live with the consequences. The way the movie figures it, she got to be an awesome boxer and had a shot at the world championship and it's better to have been there and died than to live a full life as a waitress. Which I can sorta get behind, though the thought occurred that this must be pretty insulting to people who live their whole lives as paraplegics and never had a title shot. I have a soft spot for ambivalent endings (the clearly superior choice to having a movie ending that is just sad) so this is where the movie went from bad to sorta winning me over. But you could watch Unforgiven and Gran Torino and both are better for the same thing, and as movies overall.

#195: Ben-Hur
One of the last super long movies I'll be watching. I did watch it in one sitting, so that's a plus in its favor. This movie was also good and bad in that it was sort of two movies. To be 3:40 long, you basically had two different plot lines that kind of formed an arc for the main character, but were otherwise pretty divorced. In the first one, Judah Ben-Hur gets revenge on an old friend turned antagonist (which you could see coming from miles). This is where the famous chariot race comes in, and by the way, the bad guy gets fucking WRECKED. Like, top 10 wrecked villains wrecked. The second one involves his family becoming lepers until they meet Jesus Christ and then they are better and Judah learns that forgiveness is better than revenge. I'm starting to learn that a common element of sword and sandals movies is self-insertion fanfic.

You really could divide up the separate elements and scenes and come to about half the movie each, and even though both involve Judah, they feel like the A and B plot to a sitcom. Which makes the movie feel padded. And frankly, this makes even a movie with a brisk pace and good scenes feel like it padded itself out to meet its epic runtime. Not that the finished product and the character arc are bad persay. The revenge plot is tight and very good. Any other movie would have ended after the chariot race, but an hour was left here. It was an astonishing realization. As for the forgiveness plot, cut the bad romance (Judah falls in love with one his slaves, says he'll free her if he marries her, but rails against being a slave later ugh), cut the leprosy (like of course Jesus is just gonna heal it, how fucking stupid do you think we are movie?), and just have Judah witness the crucifixion almost right after the chariot race. Bing bam boom, life lesson learned, movie over. I'm not kidding when I say that the B plot is the only thing holding down this movie. But hey, no one ever said a movie should be longer.

 

[citro]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...ami-palme-dor-winning-iranian-film-maker-dies

Kiarostami had an amazing visual language and insight into the human condition. I hope he's in a better place now. RIP.

I highly recommend his film Taste of Cherry to anyone who either likes art films, has gone through rough times, or is interested in the Middle East.

 

[vonFiedler]

#196: Wild Tales
Ever read snopes articles as a kid? Fantastic stories about violence, coincidence, unexplained events, etc. This movie plays out like a series of snopes articles. Was a movie intentionally brought down by a pilot trying to kill all passengers on board? PARTIALLY TRUE. While this event did happen, it took place a year after the movie was released.

Six varied stories about revenge. Most of them pretty fucking bombastic. Wild Tales is both a cult phenomenon outside the states and a critical darling among cinema snobs. Well, it's certainly very entertaining. The movie feels only long as its longest story, about 35 minutes I think, and it carries a level of suspense throughout. There's rarely any catharsis or denouement, or even any meaningful storytelling, but it's pure craziness. Worth checking out, I think a wide audience would enjoy it.

#197: Touch of Evil
This was really my last chance to talk about how much I fucking hate film noir, but I ended up not hating this movie. It's not only the best film noir I've seen, it's quite a bit better than Orson Welles other movie Citizen Kane and for the reasons that CK is so famous. It's damn well directed. Almost every shot is a spectacle. Just watch the opening scene, possibly the best tracking shot ever put to film.

The plot is less generic than most film noir, and actually pulls you in at points. Unfortunately, it relies a lot on an incredibly stupid wife and a comically slurring detective. But it also relies on Charlton Heston going apeshit on people. So it balances out a bit.

Touch of Evil was actually released to theaters by the studio in a butchered form. But strangely, it was this form that made the film a commercial and critical hit, even though most critics now see the restoration as the obviously superior version. I wonder how many shitty old films were studio hackjobs then? If you're a film connoisseur (and I'm not), you're supposed to see black and white as the golden era of film. But the more experience I have with movies and the more open minded I try to be, the more I can simply put words to something I've always known - the era was shit. Big fishes in small ponds developed outlandish reputations simply due to age and critics are too worried about their credibility to say otherwise.

We're getting away from the films themselves, but this is a general movie thread and all that. The way I see it, there are three major eras for filmmaking. The black-and-white era through the 60s, the directorial revolution of the 70s, and the blockbuster era that started in the 80s. Now that may seem like I'm biased toward the 70s, and I'm very much not. But we still have to be thankful to the time period because it brought about the idea that directors could shape films into works of high art, an idea that still holds a lot of sway in some parts of the industry even while naysayers focus on remakes and the like. Before the 70s, studios had even more control than they do now. A man like Orson Welles wanted the power to make good movies, but never actually had it. It's no wonder that most of the good movies from the time came from the few directors who actually had that kind of clout, like Hitchcock, Capra, and Kubrick.

 

[vonFiedler]

#199: Hachi: A Dog's Tale
I've been excited to see this movie for a while. Not because it looked good. No, definitely not that. But because it's by far the weirdest movie to be on the top 250. It's the only dog movie on the list. It's a schmaltzy low-effort family flick. It's a western adaptation of a foreign film. And it's not at all old. I mean, this is a movie where we need Richard Gere to randomly practice kendo to drive home some west-meets-east shit. Like, what a fuckin coincidence that the dog you randomly found after being abandoned by a Buddhist monastery (something that has no relevance to the story and no characters know about but needed to be shown) happens to be japanese AND you love your kendo that you get to practice with your good buddy wise asian man shang tsung. I dunno what cultural appropriation is but Myzozoa is this it? IMDB says "People who liked this also liked Happy Potter: A Fan Movie for UCLA" WHAT THE FUCK IS THIIIIIS

Anyway Hachi's Story slew me. Water works like crazy. I didn't expect to be attached to the boring human characters even an hour in, but once that last act hits it's like damn. Great fucking canine acting, great scenework. The story basically switches to the dog's point of view, and I think the movie would have been a lot more solid if it always had been. I mean, what do you expect when you're adapting the same story that inspired the best episode of Futurama? Yeah, this may be a meh movie in a lot of technical ways, but I didn't cry when I watched Grave of the Fireflies or Tokyo Story. Well, I want to watch the original Japanese version, which will probably affect how I rate this one.

#202: The Grapes of Wrath
I had seen this ages ago in school, and I felt the same way I felt about the Uncle Tom's Cabin movie. I'd rather be watching it for 2 hours than doing assigned reading. Now I'm a lot more open-minded about classic lit, and less impressed by movies. And this one was kind of meandering and boring. Scenes come and go just like Joad family. I know that the film adaptation was also heavily censored, so many good scenes were changed or fucked up. I dare say that a book version works better, able to really give each scene some importance and cram everything needed into the narrative. Of Mice and Men, which I've read and it was decent but too short, would make a better movie. Well it is a movie, but it's not on this list, and I've never really read Grapes of Wrath. Eh

#203: Annie Hall
Annie Hall evokes the old question, can you, should you separate art and artist? In theory I tend to say yes, but then Annie Hall's second scene is a fully grown Woody Allen explaining why it's normal for him to kiss little girls without their consent. That's a bit out of context, but it's hard not to see it that way. I've introduced Roman Polanski's movies by mentioning he's an actual rapist, but that's really easy when I didn't like his films. I didn't not like Annie Hall. The meta-narrative is one step ahead of other meta-narratives (the popular thing to do 40 years later) by seamlessly integrating other characters into the fourth wall breaking, making it feel like a character's thoughts in a piece of stream-of-consciousness literature. It's brilliant. And anything more book like has to score high marks with me, right? Well, if it were a book, would it have anything worth saying? Not really. Annie Hall is semi-autobiographical, and it's hard not to look at it as the ramblings of a creep. The message, love is tough but we keep doing it, is certainly not world shattering. And I've never laughed at any books that were supposed to be comical, but that's a usually not good for a movie that's supposed to be a comedy. Maybe Annie Hall will grow on me, but I'm gonna be really cautious about calling it a good movie for now.

#205: Stalker
Cheeky breeky! I didn't make the connection at first that this Stalker was related to the video games. Well, I wish I had played those, and want to now. Made by another darling filmaker with suspiciously few entries on the list, Andrei Tarkovsky, I expected the film to be a metaphysical flick not unlike the works of Ingmar Bergman, and I wasn't wrong, though it wasn't quite as good either. Take a quarter for the amount of times I've said "movie was like other movie higher on the list, but not as good". The star of the film is the dialogue. In case my sig is different when this post is read, it currently contains, "A man writes because he's tormented, because he has doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he's worth something. And if I know for sure that I'm a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?" The dialogue kind of has to be good. I don't know what guiding people through hidden alien traps looks like, but it looks a lot like three men larping in an abandoned industrial zone. Or going crazy from radiation poisoning. For a sci-fi film, very little happens, and I don't think that's for lack of budget as the takes are consistently ambitious.

And with one big post due to a weekend vacation, I've crossed the #200 threshold and into the 8.0 rated movies. I hardly think films are getting worse. I actually think they dipped mid-list and then recovered. Movies on the list are at worst 8.0s and only three pass 8.9. I've made my own top 250 now, and I can vouch that it's a lot of 8/10 movies. It would take an immense amount of time to see enough movies I think are good enough that only 9/10s are on the list.

 

[Matthew]

#196: Wild Tales


#197: Touch of Evil
This was really my last chance to talk about how much I fucking hate film noir, but I ended up not hating this movie. It's not only the best film noir I've seen, it's quite a bit better than Orson Welles other movie Citizen Kane and for the reasons that CK is so famous. It's damn well directed. Almost every shot is a spectacle. Just watch the opening scene, possibly the best tracking shot ever put to film.

The plot is less generic than most film noir, and actually pulls you in at points. Unfortunately, it relies a lot on an incredibly stupid wife and a comically slurring detective. But it also relies on Charlton Heston going apeshit on people. So it balances out a bit.

Touch of Evil was actually released to theaters by the studio in a butchered form. But strangely, it was this form that made the film a commercial and critical hit, even though most critics now see the restoration as the obviously superior version. I wonder how many shitty old films were studio hackjobs then? If you're a film connoisseur (and I'm not), you're supposed to see black and white as the golden era of film. But the more experience I have with movies and the more open minded I try to be, the more I can simply put words to something I've always known - the era was shit. Big fishes in small ponds developed outlandish reputations simply due to age and critics are too worried about their credibility to say otherwise.

We're getting away from the films themselves, but this is a general movie thread and all that. The way I see it, there are three major eras for filmmaking. The black-and-white era through the 60s, the directorial revolution of the 70s, and the blockbuster era that started in the 80s. Now that may seem like I'm biased toward the 70s, and I'm very much not. But we still have to be thankful to the time period because it brought about the idea that directors could shape films into works of high art, an idea that still holds a lot of sway in some parts of the industry even while naysayers focus on remakes and the like. Before the 70s, studios had even more control than they do now. A man like Orson Welles wanted the power to make good movies, but never actually had it. It's no wonder that most of the good movies from the time came from the few directors who actually had that kind of clout, like Hitchcock, Capra, and Kubrick.

I'm probably not the most objective to the topic of Touch of Evil but that's mostly because Cox (the director of Repoman) was the professor for one of the film classes I've taken (and he's heavily influenced by the style of filming if you've seen any of his work). What I will give him is this: the opening sequence of Touch of Evil might be easily the most beautifully shot scene in film history. It travels easily from low shot crane into high shot into following a car, into a couple, into a regular camera (apparently he was on set for this so I'm taking it as his word) so beautifully that I don't think I could actually compare it to anything.

Single segment camera scenes are so hard to come by now, the only iteration I can think of right now is the Raid: Redemption (a wonderful action movie if no one has seen it), and for them to be done well is so fucking hard. I stood by while the director of the short I helped with struggled with a maybe 15 second single segment scene, so to do so with something that is well over three minutes is incredible.

edit:

upon re-watching the Raid: Redemption there are no sweet single segment scenes but I heavily suggest watching the film if you're a fan of action.

edit 2:

all the scenes are sweet though.

 

[ButteredToast]

vonFiedler

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top-indian-movies?ref_=nv_mv_250_in_7

The people at IMDB have created a separate Top 250 list for Indian movies. I'm somewhat half intrigued but at the same time, the two Indian movies on the "real" 250 were just quirk-erly average.

 

[vonFiedler]

Yeah I saw this when it first went up. Funny stuff.

Indian movies are
A. Fucking awful
B. Beloved by ~125 million english speaking upvoters

These people just don't give a fuck at all. They argue that their shitty movies our better than American superhero movies (no), to make it seem like a cultural thing. But their movies are worse than those of any of the other major movie-making countries. Iran, Japan, Russia, Italy, China, the Spanish sector... the list goes on...

The traits that are common among Indian films are laughed out of any country with the slightest critical backbone
1. Way too long
2. Schmaltzy
3. Melodrama
4. Slapstick!!!
5. Half-assed musicals with 2 or 3 numbers in your 4 hour movie

But what can you do about it? Is the IMDB list really legit if you exclude movies for these reasons? Hell, you could stand to exclude a few Christopher Nolan movies if you're gonna do that. On the other hand, does anyone want a list with 100 Indian films on it?

I don't know what real reasons IMDB has had in the past for quickly kicking movies off the list when they turn up suddenly. I suppose maybe they are fighting (alleged) vote manipulation?

It's probably not a coincidence that about a month ago IMDB was India bombed like fucking crazy. 11 films were added to the list, while the current 3 shot up like mad. Something definitely fishy was going on there. This list was probably made to appease and prevent stuff like that. But will anyone really be happy with it? I'll ignore it, and bollywood fans probably won't see it as the same thing.

 

[vonFiedler]

#165: Come and See
I once read that no war movie was entirely anti-war. That person has probably not seen Come and See. It's more Grave of the Fireflies than war movies that revel in their gruesome action, showing mostly the effects of war on common people, but the boy protagonist in this movie at least intends to join the war effort. He just never makes it that far. He goes through absolute hell, and the combination of his acting and over-the-top surrealism really make you feel his pain. It has an energy that demands to be watched.

#206: Before Sunrise
It's Richard Linklater, hollywood's most ambitious least ambitious director. Now I didn't check, but I'm fairly certain that the intention of Before Sunrise was always to follow it up with two sequels set nine years apart in real time (if this series doesn't just keep going). Say what you will about Boyhood (I'm gonna see it but have yet to), when you walk out of that movie you have a complete picture of what the director was trying to do. I'm mildly curious about where the series goes, which is odd, because Before Sunrise was fairly boring. I was not drawn in by the sometimes cynical/sometimes romantic ramblngs of the protagonists, or cared about who they were, and as such didn't really care about their romantic plight. I'm not saying a story where a few characters mostly talk can't work... but I can mostly think of examples in video games, not movies.

 

[vonFiedler]

#206: The Bourne Ultimatum
Before I could see this movie, I needed to watch the first two. Not because I'd never seen them, but because I couldn't remember them. And I'd seen Identity twice! The Bourne Identity is a bit novel but very dry and anticlimactic. Supremacy goes for a more cliched plot, and added shaky cam and fridge stuffing. Can't deny that overall it was a slight improvement though. Ultimatum slightly improves again and was a good stopping point for the series, but maybe you can tell that I think they are all only okay. Matt Damon is the biggest reason to watch, but he's better in other movies. And if you want something similar but much better, you could be watching 24.

Ultimatum is the only spy movie on the list. There's no James Bond, or Mission Impossible, or Jack Ryan to compete with it. And the absence of most of those films isn't strange, the whole genre is not seriously very good. But I'd sure as fuck put Casino Royale or Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol above it. Hell, it's a damn shame that Kingsman never even overtook Ultimatum before slipping off the list entirely. It's a list anomaly, about 10 ranks away from the similar Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 both now and when they debuted.

#208: Gandhi
A biopic that I actually like, and why not, it's really very similar to The Message. Messiah figures fighting against oppression and trying to spread a message about religious unity. Both fairly long movies taking place in distant locations. It's just that, y'know, Gandhi happens to be a well-made movie. Not to mention that while The Message didn't portray its protagonist, Gandhi has the career-defining performance of Ben Kingsley.


In a note unrelated to this list, anyone surprised that it's taken me one movie to hate Lars von Trier?

 

[Jebus McAzn]

just saw suicide squad about an hour ago, some non-spoilery brief thoughts:

• it suffered from a lot of the same problems as BvS where it just felt extremely poorly put together. the writing is inconsistent (and cringey at times) and the scene transitions are absolutely god-awful. there's total shifts in tone between one scene and the next, and the events themselves are spliced in a way that kills the urgency of the movie
• will smith's character was easily the best part of the movie, viola davis was great too. margot robbie is a decent harley quinn but her character could have been handled far better. leto was surprisingly tolerable as the joker - i thought the script was lacking but his performance was actually not too bad. literally everyone else in the cast is forgettable (and some could actually have improved the movie by not being there at all)
• people are praising the visual aspects of the movie but I was sorely disappointed by the fight choreography, which just lacked all of the oomph that Man of Steel and BvS had. even compared to either of the Avengers films, I thought the fight scenes fell flat, which I wasn't expecting to say given that DC's visuals have really been their only edge over marvel's stuff recently

overall it was fun and entertaining and had its fair share of great moments held together by a paper-thin plot

i could write more about some of the plot-specific events but it's late and i don't feel like it

 

[Soul Fly]

vonFiedler

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top-indian-movies?ref_=nv_mv_250_in_7

The people at IMDB have created a separate Top 250 list for Indian movies. I'm somewhat half intrigued but at the same time, the two Indian movies on the "real" 250 were just quirk-erly average.

Yeah I saw this when it first went up. Funny stuff.

Indian movies are
A. Fucking awful
B. Beloved by ~125 million english speaking upvoters

These people just don't give a fuck at all. They argue that their shitty movies our better than American superhero movies (no), to make it seem like a cultural thing. But their movies are worse than those of any of the other major movie-making countries. Iran, Japan, Russia, Italy, China, the Spanish sector... the list goes on...

The traits that are common among Indian films are laughed out of any country with the slightest critical backbone
1. Way too long
2. Schmaltzy
3. Melodrama
4. Slapstick!!!
5. Half-assed musicals with 2 or 3 numbers in your 4 hour movie

But what can you do about it? Is the IMDB list really legit if you exclude movies for these reasons? Hell, you could stand to exclude a few Christopher Nolan movies if you're gonna do that. On the other hand, does anyone want a list with 100 Indian films on it?

I don't know what real reasons IMDB has had in the past for quickly kicking movies off the list when they turn up suddenly. I suppose maybe they are fighting (alleged) vote manipulation?

It's probably not a coincidence that about a month ago IMDB was India bombed like fucking crazy. 11 films were added to the list, while the current 3 shot up like mad. Something definitely fishy was going on there. This list was probably made to appease and prevent stuff like that. But will anyone really be happy with it? I'll ignore it, and bollywood fans probably won't see it as the same thing.

As a resident brownie I feel the need to chime in a bit about this.

Re: Bollywood Movies are fucking awful

See. Here's the thing. Most "Bollywood" movies you'll encounter are critically mediocre, and unapologetic about it. The cultural mainstream yardstick that operates w.r.t these movies are completely different than most of you guys are probably used to. This film industry has a culture of cult personalities and cinema operates as a social festival. You'll have vegetable hawkers and rickshaw pullers save up money throughout the week to catch the Friday premiere of their demi-god/star beating up a bunch of bad guys and saving the princess, or engaging in humour that strikes a chord with the lowest common denominator. So it really doesn't matter that Roger Ebert or whoever would probably give these movies a half-star, or even lower tbh, because the movie is less about the movie itself but rather a carnivalesque celebration among communities that worship stars. The movie isn't evaluated by individual merit and critical perception, but is judged by whether or not it could provide wholesome entertainment to a family of 7 spanning 3 generations, who probably go to the cinema hall on friday nights, which makes up a significant portion of their leisure and luxury. The Indian movie is a social affair. Imagine a party, but one that your grandpa gets to attend.. So no wonder most mainstream movies are formulaic affairs that try to cater to a spectrum of audience that ranges from 6-60+ years, and appeal to as many people as possible with song-dance sequences and happy endings that promote conservative values. In fact most famous stars have annual release cycles (for example you'll have Salman Khan release a gratuitous action-romance every Eid that'll gross almost half as much as an Avengers movie in its opening weekend, or that standard comedy release every diwali etc etc).

So basically I think because of such a variation in culture IMDB felt the need for a different list because the local audience of one would react completely differently to the other. The list does reflect a sort-of a mainstream canon of Indian movies cultivated over repeated trans-generational family viewings and the pop-culture and lore around the movies and the actors. A movie might be remembered not necessarily because it was a critical success, but because it was the debut of a hot actress (Mandakini: Ram Teri Ganga Maili, a generation of Indian fathers masturbated to the waterfall sequence) , or had very good songs (Anand), a memorable song/dance sequence (Disco Dancer, every cult 80s hit), or quotable dialogues (Sholay, DDLJ) etc etc.

But I don't think there's something uniquely terrible about mainstream Bollywood. Try catching a mainstream japanese/italian/whateverthefuck comedy/action flick that usually never gets any global traction and it'll be almost as cringey if not more. Same shit in India except you'll have 600 million+ people fervently worshipping it because of this complex cultural fabric that surrounds the industry. Imagine half your country worshipped Adam Sandler (maybe they do, I have no fucking clue how else he gets away with releasing bullshit every summer), would you define Adam Sandler as "Hollywood Cinema"? Because tbh he's your most popular cultural export around the planet.

In fact the younger urban generation of Indians are very ironic and proud about this dubious history of Bollywood. An example of this can be found in the content produced by them.

it's a mock-review of perhaps the biggest cult-classic in Indian Cinema (Dilwaale Duhaniya le Jaayenge). It's mostly in English and you can follow the plot points if you take a few minutes to read the wikipedia summary of the plot.

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However that doesn't mean that there aren't "good" Indian movies that can appeal to a critical audience. There are independent ventures and smaller regional projects that regularly get accolades at renowned movie festivals and and jury-awards. Even the mainstream has matured recently to provide richer, more complex narratives and original character development, as many of these indie filmmakers and storytellers are slowly finding a national voice. If I had to recommend a few recent ones, you guys could check out: Gangs of Wasseypur (Parts 1 and 2), Udaan, Dev D, Haider, Paan Singh Tomar, Maqbool, Omakara, Udta Punjab. All of these movies represent a vast topical spectrum of social/political issues, character sketches, and slice of life narratives of the Indian flavour. Many have deep influences and references, for example the movies in this list directed by Vishal Bhardwaj have heavy parallels with Shakespearean tragedy and the influence of certain seminal pieces of work in cinema (eg: Godfather) in the dissection of the intrigues of the films, or for example Works of Anurag Kashyap plumb deep into the spectacle of violence and chaos to derive meaningful narratives. Most of you will find something that appeals to your criticcality in this wave of independent and modern-mainstream Indian cinema, and the best part is that it's evolving everyday.


tl;dr - this post isn't as much of a defense of Indian cinema as it is a effort to break the one-dimensional conception of this medium in this thread dominated by the lowest base mainstream.

 

[Matthew]

Okay, maybe I do like trash movies sometimes (though I would never call it a trash movie) but the Bollywood film Dhoom: 3 (the third in the trilogy, obviously) actually is one of the best films I've seen recently. It engages in both a dynamic plot, characters that, while are slap-stick, are also human in the most amazing of ways. Shit gets crazy in Bollywood during action films (horse sliding, people punching cars that explode, motorcycling a tightrope) but none of those are out of the norm for action movies presently in the US. I just think the way that film is centered in Bollywood ( something one and all can enjoy) incorporates these aspects of song and dance to the ridiculous violence is why people are turned off from it.

It will never be that, "it's not realistic," it's that the unrealistic is shown next to something so ridiculous to the culture we were born into that it seems stupid. However you can't tell me that The Avengers or The Borne: (whatever it is now) is equally as unrealistic as a Bollywood film? No. It just isn't a thing to the culture.

 

[vonFiedler]

Soul Fly

There's certainly got to be SOME Indian films I'd like, but the ones that have been presented to me as "the best!!!" have fallen abnormally short. Gangs is on my list of films to see, I certainly don't look forward to watching a 6 hour movies but I'll try to keep an open mind.

I don't buy that it's a difference in cultural, as I brought up, I'm very much interested in film from other countries. And while the IMDB top 250 lists a large number of American films, that's actually very disingenuous as a massive number of those are Canadian/English films with a bit of hollywood help. We also have films and other art forms that try to appeal to as many people as people, this is another thing that is generally frowned upon. Maybe the best comparison are current CG animated films, and a lot of those are much worse than people usually give them credit for. But the way you describe it, it seems like Bollywood operates in the same kind of cultural space as Glee and The Big Bang Theory... (the imdb top 250 on tv looks absolutely trash in spite of the higher potential of the medium).

Another thing that breaks the idea of this being purely a cultural barrier is that the problems I described of Bollywood are not entirely unique as you say, but they aren't shared by mainstream American films NOW. They were in the black and white era. Bollywood is probably a lot like Hollywood was right at the dawn of talking pictures. And this might make some fridge sense at first, if Bollywood is a burgeoning industry, but then again, that's not a path that other big film countries have gone down.

 

[GatoDelFuego]

Just saw Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Ultimate Edition, Director's Cut::: The Real Version two days ago as prep for suicide squad.

I haven't seen the theatrical cut, but was seriously impressed with BvS. Maybe the theater cut was severely lacking in the backstory, but this version is a political thriller first and Dark Knight Returns second. I feel like it took some great inspiration from both Injustice and New 52 Justice League, in particular the issue of injustice where batman says "there's a scream that can't be silenced". The entire movie is a slow boil until the final scene which I think is perfectly paced and makes the final fight more meaningful. I think Lex's villainy plot has a bigger role in the ultimate edition, which I really liked. Doomsday is OK or something but Lex is the true villain of BvS and I really enjoyed it. He IS just Mark Zuckerberg, but that's ok because I think it's what this universe needed. Wonder Woman's role is fantastic; the moment when she blasts Doomsday back with her bracers and Junkie XL's theme kicks in is awesome. Every side character in this movie has motivations and backstories that make them real people rather than just cardboard cutouts. I was really impressed with the new batman, as I feel it is perfectly capturing the badass comics batman rather than "theatricality and deception" nolan batman. Maybe I'm just the guy that the DCCU is aimed for.

On the other hand, I was super disappointed with suicide squad. You can really tell they reshot this movie HARD, and it definitely did not work out. They needed to reshoot the entire damn movie to improve it at all. The action felt like something out of an NBC drama. I was impressed with Deadshot's role as Will Smith and El Diablo as well, but margot robie had some pretty awful lines. Hearing 4 or 5 people in the theatre laugh to "we're bad guys!@!!! it's what we do" just made me want to die inside; have you people not seen ANY trailer for this movie? Katanna had potential but could be erased from the movie with no consequences. "The man who can climb anything," good gracious why even introduce this character. I thought captain boomerang was ok but he clearly should have been a more defined character. Enchantress was actually pretty nice when I think about it. Amanda Waller really is the star of the show. Jared Leto's "pimp" joker has a really good niche and I am excited for the future films with him.

Where this movie comes together is when the neon-lit backstory flashbacks come on with 70's rock music, but every time it felt like it was getting into the groove we had *record scratch noise* 180 tone shift. Every time I started to smile at the synergy with the characters they threw it away and led us back into a Sci-Fi channel original movie: Invasion of the Bubble Wrap Men. The number of fakeouts in this movie are criminal. Off the top of my head the elevator fight, the squad going to the bar, "oops I missed the shot Ms Waller", the first helicopter being shot down but everyone is ok, the second helicopter being shot down but everyone is also ok, the explosion that kills croc and diablo, enchantress dying but is actually ok, boomerang left but actually came back again, joker died but he came back again again...what's the point? How many times are we going to hammer the point home that el diablo killed his children? Did anybody not know this before they saw the movie? The entire film was a missed connection.

 

[Karxrida]

The Alex Hirsch (creator of Gravity Falls) and Nicole Perlman (writer for Guardians of the Galaxy and some other Marvel stuff) are going to write the live-action Detective Pikachu movie. It actually has a chance of being good now.

 

[ButteredToast]

Watching the entire Harry Potter series because I feel like I need to rate them and haven't seen them since I was a young kid.

In watching the first three movies, it becomes apparent that Dumbledore is by far one of the most completely overrated and most bitchass of characters in movie history. His direct action or lack of action caused the entire plots of movies one and two, and his blatant stupidity could have prevented the climax of the entire third movie.

That combined to what I remember what untimely happens to Dumbledore makes him a horrible character and just a moronic school principal/leader. God damn. If Harry Potter and gang wasn't around to bail his ass out in the first 3 movies, he'd get his fucking dick sued off.

I'm sure I'll rant about Dumbledore when I finish the series. But god damn. His track record in the first 3 movies is horrendous. And this doesn't even come CLOSE to how horrible he is at hiring teachers. That's another rant in it's own.

 

[Karxrida]

Got a chance to see Finding Dory.

Not as good as the Toy Story sequels, but still a pretty good movie and definitely a lot better than Brave. (Haven't seen Pixar's other recent offerings or Cars 2, so I can't compare them fairly.) It was pretty good at avoiding a plot retread of its predecessor despite having some parallels, the call backs weren't excessive (and the ones that were present didn't feel forced), the comedy was funny (though the "The Talk" joke made me cringe), and the feels were very effective.

The short before the movie was cute, too.

 

[RODAN]

what are some good slasher films to check out (i've seen all of halloween/friday 13th/elm street series) i'm a big fan of the cliched stuff, if its good

 

[GatoDelFuego]

what are some good slasher films to check out (i've seen all of halloween/friday 13th/elm street series) i'm a big fan of the cliched stuff, if its good

my bloody valentine?

 

[Ampharos]

Kubo and the Two Strings is the best film that's come out this year and it's not even close.

 

[Isza]

Has anyone seen the movie "Don't Breathe? Heard its new and just released, looks really scary.