What Movies are you Watching?

[ShiroiHikari]

Gonna re-watch Watchmen and then watch Gran Torino, and then I'm putting my Netflix on hold again.

[Makachop^^128]

I saw Drunken Angel the other day. Really good older Kurosawa with probably my favorite role that Takashi Shimura plays (topping both his roles in Ikiru and Seven Samurai). Toshiro Mifune is in it....of course he was brilliant.
I've been too busy watching "Black Adder" recently to get around to "Dersu Uzala", which is my next movie. Speaking of "Black Adder".....anyone who is a fan of "House" ought to see his roles in "Black Adder III" and "Black Adder Goes Forth" for an interesting Hugh Laurie role. He's probably my favorite actor in the series!

ah! most see!
big Takashi Shimura fan

[the_wolfs_howl]

Well, I've watched a lot of movies recently, but the last one I watched was the Death Note live-action movie. Soooooo gooooood!!! A lot of my appreciation for it came from being a fan of the story already, and my anime fangirlism taking over at the sound of Japanese being spoken, but I think it would also be a good movie for someone who's not familiar with the story. Very exciting and tense, and Light and L had very good actors. The intro was just about the most exciting one of any movie I've ever seen, and the final scene was really dramatic and made me want to rush out and grab the sequel. The only thing I can complain about is that Ryuk was way too obviously CG, and Misa-Misa, though hilarious, didn't seem to serve much purpose except for leading up to her role in the sequel, which would no doubt confuse someone who didn't know her role already.

[Fish and Chips]

Phantom of the Paradise.

My dad told me he watched this movie a million times back in his submarine days. I think I can see why.

[Cognitive Gear]

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

This just might be my new favorite Batman movie. I really wish that I had seen it in theaters.

[GhostontheNet]

Phantom of the Paradise.

My dad told me he watched this movie a million times back in his submarine days. I think I can see why.

Oh yes, it's quite clever, a remarkable cult classic. Jessica Harper's performance as Phoenix really stands out, it's no wonder Dario Argento sought her out for Suspiria.

[NarutoAngel221]

I have just finished watching The haunted I thought it was a great movie because the poster seems enticing but it turned out the movie is slopply and not that great effects too

[GhostontheNet]

Last night I watched 5. Let the Right One In and 4. Edward Scissorhands. I'm getting really close to finishing my top thirteen films!

[GhostontheNet]

Tonight I watched 3. Pan's Labyrinth, 2. Sleepy Hollow, and The Addams Family. One last film and I've finished the entire set.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

Pan's Labyrinth is brilliant - one of my favourite movies.
Sleepy Hollow was very mediocre in my books.

Just finished watching Charade (1963) with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Great little movie. 8/10

[GhostontheNet]

Pan's Labyrinth is brilliant - one of my favourite movies.
Sleepy Hollow was very mediocre in my books.

I definitely agree with you on Pan's Labyrinth. I couldn't agree with you less on Sleepy Hollow. It is a brilliant example of old-school Gothic horror that pays homage to both the first and second wave of Gothic novels, as well as the general output of Hammer films and Roger Corman. It is a film with brilliant symbolic and thematic resonance. I even wrote my final critical analysis in The Horror Film on Sleepy Hollow, achieving some truly remarkable findings (link). Please read my essay, and then reconsider.

[Htom Sirveaux]

Continuing my run of the Planet of the Apes films, I've just watched the fourth installment, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. This might actually be the best one so far. Certainly I'm consistently surprised with how good each one really is. . . . Once you get past the ape suits, anyway. Last one left is the fifth: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

And Ghost, that sounds like a good idea, I should try that. I think I'll limit it to a nice even number like 10, though.

[Sheol777]

Continuing my run of the Planet of the Apes films, I've just watched the fourth installment, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. This might actually be the best one so far. Certainly I'm consistently surprised with how good each one really is. . . . Once you get past the ape suits, anyway. Last one left is the fifth: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

And Ghost, that sounds like a good idea, I should try that. I think I'll limit it to a nice even number like 10, though.

Plan on watching the remake?

[Htom Sirveaux]

Plan on watching the remake?

Great buttery goodness, no. I've seen the trailer. It's awful.

[Blitzkrieg1701]

I just finished watching Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron (Quentin Tarantino's got me on a WWII kick right now)

[RobinSena]

I definitely agree with you on Pan's Labyrinth. I couldn't agree with you less on Sleepy Hollow.

Pan's Labyrinth was amazing. I haven't seen Sleepy Hollow yet, although I need to.

Earlier tonight I watched Se7en. Great movie.

[GhostontheNet]

Over the past 12 hours, I watched Amelie and Session 9.

And Ghost, that sounds like a good idea, I should try that. I think I'll limit it to a nice even number like 10, though.

Quite so. I tend to like making lists of 13 because Goth has a thing for flaunting taboos and superstitions, and said number lends the contents a dark mystique that makes the contents both foreboding and intriguing to the reader. The astute observer of my blog, for example, will note that I have 13 Gothic links, 13 Gothic bands, and 13 Christian links.

Pan's Labyrinth was amazing. I haven't seen Sleepy Hollow yet, although I need to.

Yeah, you should definitely watch Sleepy Hollow. Don't worry too much about my essay, I made sure not to disclose the identity of the killer, and it will help clue you in on some of the imagery.

[GhostontheNet]

I just finished watching 1. Nosferatu the Vampyre. It's been a good run.

[Htom Sirveaux]

Composing a Top 10 list was harder than I thought, so I compromised and made it 11.

Kicking things off with The Dark Crystal.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

Se7en, Amelie and Session 9 are all very good movies. The first of the three is incredibly disturbing though.

Yesterday I saw Ponyo at the cinemas. Great fairytale! A baptism of the imagination. 9/10

[Arya Raiin]

Okay, I watched a lot of movies over the last week...

17 Again (:dizzy:)
Eragon (It's okay.)
The Corpse Bride (Ehhh... it's alright. It's the second time I've seen it.)
The Nightmare Before Xmas (:rock:)
Ice Age 3 (I saw it last week but forgot to post it. It's awesome.)
King of Texas (Yay Texas! I don't even live their by my dad was raised there... LOL)

[GhostontheNet]

Wow, you all have been on a roll lately!

Composing a Top 10 list was harder than I thought, so I compromised and made it 11.

Kicking things off with The Dark Crystal.

It's tricky, isn't it? Thinking it over, you realize you've been watching movies for so long that you have more like a hundred favorite films. For my list, I had to choose those films I have seen at least 25 times, never grow tired of watching despite practically memorizing them, and have profound symbolic resonance.

Se7en, Amelie and Session 9 are all very good movies. The first of the three is incredibly disturbing though.

Yesterday I saw Ponyo at the cinemas. Great fairytale! A baptism of the imagination. 9/10

Yeah, Amelie and Session 9 rule, although I can't speak for Se7en one way or the other. Actually, the last movie I watched that I was disappointed with was Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which I really just watched because it was one of the movies feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey used as a point of departure for her influential discussion of media voyeurism. I guess you could say that over time I've sort of picked up the mojo of movie selection, so basically everything I watch turns out to be pretty good.

Ponyo was quite excellent, it was a pleasure to see it in theaters. I was bobbing and weaving with all the shots in motion and making creative gestures with my hands to match the mood of the scenes. It should be illegal to have that much fun in public. I noticed Miyazaki seems to have finally reached the point of promoting worship of a mother goddess who rules over nature. Still, from the Christian perspective, I see no problem taking her as an echo of Wisdom, a feminine hypostasis of the divine nature who occupies similar roles within the context of Biblical monolatry (cf. Proverbs 8 and my paper on Sleepy Hollow).

[Cognitive Gear]

Kill Bill Volume 1 & 2

Not as amazing as some people had led me to believe, but still a whole lot of fun.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

That's great to hear you enjoyed Ponyo. I realise Miyazaki is an atheist but that scene with the Mother goddess was very Buddhist/Hindu in nature. It was straight out of an Osamu Tezuka anime/manga.

Interestingly enough, I really enjoyed Vertigo the second time I watched it, and the third but not the first.

[GhostontheNet]

I just got back from watching May and Alice with my friend Amy.

That's great to hear you enjoyed Ponyo. I realise Miyazaki is an atheist but that scene with the Mother goddess was very Buddhist/Hindu in nature. It was straight out of an Osamu Tezuka anime/manga.

Interestingly enough, I really enjoyed Vertigo the second time I watched it, and the third but not the first.

Well, one of the notorious pitfalls with environmentalism is that you get so caught up in the astonishing power of nature that you start worshipping it rather than taking it as a signpost pointing to the power of its creator. For both Hinduism and Shinto/Buddhism, this wouldn't really be seen as a problem, but for Christianity, it is. Osamu Tezuka's Buddhist texts present a number of similarities, but Ponyo's goddess is more in line with Hayao Miyazaki's ideology. One of the common accusations made against the Judeo-Christian conception of God is that by way of its exclusively masculine nature, it represents the deification of patriarchal authority. Of course, my own way of addressing these concerns has been the development of a robust Wisdom theology deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition, noting that Wisdom has always represented the feminine characteristics of God. Within Miyazaki's film text however, extra attention is drawn to the power of the goddess, who exhibits a strong parallelism to Sosuke's mother. It would seem, then, that Miyazaki's film implicitly represents an ecofeminist critique of patriarchal capitalism and its exploitation and neglect of women and nature. Tezuka's women, by contrast, appear to be exquisitely cute, but mostly ineffectual.

Which brings us to Hitchcock's Vertigo. During the filming of The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock is reported to have said "I always believe in the following the advice of the playwright Sardou. He said 'Torture the women!' The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough." (Carol J. Clover, "Her Body, Himself" in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film by Barry Keith Grant p. 88) True to this misogynistic philosophy, the narrative of Vertigo is set up to extract the maximum amount of torture and humiliation out of the woman possible before her final and fatal punishment, to romance her and kill her all in the same movie. Throughout the film, the protagonist laments the loss of "a man's freedom", which in the text represents the "freedom" to dominate over women (note, for example, the conversation in the bookstore). To make a long ranting short, from the patriarchal police officer's obsessive pursuit of "Madeleine" on the flimsiest of evidence to his humiliating reconstruction of Judy as "Madeleine", and then setting her up to fall off the roof, the film's view on gender is most unflattering. And because the film is precisely about gender, there's little opportunity to say 'Yeah, this movie's view of gender really sucks, but these other aspects give it redeeming value.'

[Radical Dreamer]

Saw District 9 today! It was pretty awesome. XD

[Maledicte]

Brotherhood of the Wolf, Director's cut.

It made me very happy. It didn't feel like a "French" movie, it just felt like a really good "movie" movie. And it entertained me. Very cool story. I didn't know it was based off of true events (embellished, obviously, with a Native American man performing martial arts.) I'm glad I watched the director's cut, because I liked how the romance subplot developed, as it was believable and not saccharine.

Mani/Mark Dacascos was amazing. Monica Bellucci was also in it, which I didn't know when I picked up the DVD, so I was very pleasantly surprised. If she and Mark had actually shared a single frame of film for a second, my TV might have spontaneously combusted on account of their collective hotness. They're probably the two most beautiful people in the world IMO.

Also, I discovered that the villain (Vincent Cassel) is also Monsieur Hood from Shrek, which provided me with plenty of giggles afterwards.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

I thought it was okay. The action was very good, loved the costumes, the story was quite decent but the acting was greatly varied. The nudity was unexpected too.

[GhostontheNet]

Tonight I watched Mystic Pizza.

[ShiroiHikari]

Saw Gran Torino yesterday. Excellent film.