Game of Death with Butch Lee. it was pretty bad. I was reading about the whole story surrounding the movie and it was pretty interesting stuff, how the funeral scene actually contained footage from lee's funeral, and all the brucesploitation films that popped up after its release. there were a few good shots from an art/directing pov but besides that and the background info it was a pretty awful movie. bruce lee only shows up towards the end I think. oh and the yellow tracksuit is pretty good, symbolizes china I guess

Still going with silent (well......mostly silent at this point) films, saw Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times last night.  I enjoyed it, the feeding machine at the beginning was the highlight of the film as far as comedy is concerned, I also like that he eats a ridiculous amount of cocaine and it just sort of makes him walk around in circles for a while.  His relationship with the gamin (don't remember her name, just the word GAMIN because i had never heard it before) was kind of weird, I guess I thought of her as much younger than she is and Charlie Chaplin looks much older, so it felt really really strange.  But then again this is Hollywood, love at first sight and all that.  It was a good movie overall.

Except Charlie Chaplin has the creepiest smile.

I fell on a 1998 movie called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I have this big love for thieves action/comedy movies like Ocean's 11/12/13 and The Italian Job and this movie is pretty much an over the top criminal story with fast forwards quickly followed by slow motion, giving some scene an very chaotic feeling, over the top characters and I probably missed half the jokes because they were very british. Absolutely loved it.

Yeah, I remember watching this film after hearing about how awesome it was as a thriller and by the end of it I was so disappointed! I don't really see what all the hoopla was about. And this is coming for a person who enjoys sudden plot twists most of the time.

I hadn't seen this movie in a long time, but gave it a re-watching when it came up in a post a while back. I remember thinking the movie was incredible (or whatever term I would have used at the time) when I first saw it, and I remember talking about it with my friends at school. At that age, I guess it was really impressive.

Re-watching it made it less so, almost to a point where I wish I hadn't so that I could have been left with a better impression. In the interim I've seen/read so many stories that do what Jacob's Ladder tried to do, only better. At this point I'd even put Hellraiser:Inferno above it. Also, I couldn't help but add my own commentary as I was watching the ending of Jacob's Ladder - "And that was when he knew where he was going..." (from the Burroughs story 'Where he was going')

Game of Death with Butch Lee. it was pretty bad. I was reading about the whole story surrounding the movie and it was pretty interesting stuff, how the funeral scene actually contained footage from lee's funeral, and all the brucesploitation films that popped up after its release. there were a few good shots from an art/directing pov but besides that and the background info it was a pretty awful movie. bruce lee only shows up towards the end I think. oh and the yellow tracksuit is pretty good, symbolizes china I guess

It is a lesson in how (not) to make a film when the star dies before completion. It seemed also to have no script supervisor, nor anyone with the ability to say "CUT" when a take went bad. How else can you explain a final cut of a movie that contains "They're across the skreet!" as dialog. The cut-aways even in the fights that actually used Bruce Lee footage are jarring and obvious as hell. And they also don't explain how the character has plastic surgery to cover up getting shot in the face, but manages to look like himself at the end...except when he's doing a flip or getting hit. Variable plastic surgery strikes again.

Laura.  At face value it is just a very good film noir.  BUT THAT IS NOT ENOUGH FOR ME.  What I really liked about this film was its ambiguous nature; that is, that the second half very well good have all just been a dream.  I was worried for a while that it would end with the main character waking up and being like AH, IF ONLY... but thankfully it didn't end that way.  Anyway there are all kinds of hint throughout the movie implying that the second half is a dream, which gives the whole movie more substance because it makes the main character and the ending that much more interesting.  Anyway it was great!  Not perfect, really, but I liked it a lot.

You know it's kind of a shame that a lot of (most?) directors don't know how to handle dreams in film.  I think that dreams, when handled well, are great for developing characters, but to most directors they are just opportunities for empty symbolism, obvious foreshadowing, and/or weak attempts at surrealism.  Dreams, I think, are better when they take up a large portion of the film, as in Laura and Mulholland Dr./Lost Highway/Blue Velvet (you can make pretty strong arguments for Lost Highway and Blue Velvet, and I think Mulholland Dr. is pretty obvious), and are left ambiguous.  Mulholland Dr. is the best dream movie as far as I'm concerned.  WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON DREAM SEQUENCES (Dallas ruined them for everybody)

Man I was just reading about Laura recently.  I plan on watching it sometime, glad to hear it's gr8!

also I didn't know that that one guy was vincent price.  he didn't have his mustache!! also he was blond or something?

It is a lesson in how (not) to make a film when the star dies before completion. It seemed also to have no script supervisor, nor anyone with the ability to say "CUT" when a take went bad. How else can you explain a final cut of a movie that contains "They're across the skreet!" as dialog. The cut-aways even in the fights that actually used Bruce Lee footage are jarring and obvious as hell. And they also don't explain how the character has plastic surgery to cover up getting shot in the face, but manages to look like himself at the end...except when he's doing a flip or getting hit. Variable plastic surgery strikes again.

I didn't notice the face change during flipping etc but I'm pretty sure lee could do his own flips. that plastic surgery part was actually pretty funny though, like you'd think they were going to use it to cover up the fact that they used different actors for the same part. maybe that was their original intention, but instead they have him "look exactly the same" after surgery and just wear sunglasses and a beard.

Bruce Lee had doubles for certain acrobatic scenes throughout his movies. For a while I thought he did all of his own stuff too. In one of Jackie Chan's biographies, he recounts some of his early stuntwork when he and his Opera School brothers were farmed out as stuntmen. Jackie wanted to double Bruce for some shots, but that went to an older brother in the company who "had Lee's whip like physique." Jackie instead was the one to double the Japanese master at the end of Chinese Connection for the "getting kicked fifty feet out of a rice wall" scene.

I saw Jennifer's Body. Fox french kisses a girl in the middle of the movie. Otherwise it's pretty bad.

Oh and there's an evil indie rock band, and a bunch of hip teenage reference like in Juno.

Now that the shock is passed, I can write something a little bit more comprehensive and somewhat usable in my critique for my class once I pass it through some translation.
Don't read if you don't want spoilers but anyway you won't miss much if I tell you as the story is pretty wow.

The moral of the movie surprisingly holds up. I know it sounds crazy and that the moral is on the level of a Degrassi episode or some lame slasher from the 80's, but it does holds up. The moral is basically this: Have safe sex kids, don't sleep around. The whole thing can be resumed by one scene in the middle of the movie. You have a nice parallel between Demon Fox getting that boy in some dirty abandoned house with rats running around and her geeky friend having cute, protected and somewhat awkward sex in his bedroom. Seriously, if it was a teen movie and not some sort of demon possession horror flick, instead of eating the poor dude, Fox would have got a nasty MTS from him or a rat or anything. The whole freaking movie holds on to this moral. It's not a bad moral and if not for some other points it might have been ok but Diablo Cody (who also wrote Juno, so it's full of pop, blog, wikipedia references) really fucked up the story. I won't go into details but the premise is simply wrong. An indie rock group(whose music is anything but satanic) decides to sacrifice a virgin to Satan so they get pierce into the music business ? Sure, why not. The real shame is that it even fails as an horror movie. There is no real scare, no real surprise, and you see every events coming from a mile away. But maybe I'm wrong. By reading the positive reviews, I'm supposed to see it as something satirical, sexy and feminist. First, if it's satirical and self-aware like those 90's horror movies (Scream), I could forgive the ridicule plot but I am still expecting some scares. Two, sure it's sexy, they have a lesbian make-out session in the middle of the movie, but going by that, porn makes great movies. And three, the word feminist gets thrown a lot around horror movies with girls killing demons, and in this case a bitch demon. Maybe it is feminist and is empowering females and blablabla...... feminism doesn't make a movie good or bad, it's just something good on the side. Jennifer's Body is a teen movie, something guys will brings their girlfriends to for a nice little scare (that they won't even get), and hear all those hip tweeter references and internet (their internet not our internet) memes they can relate to because they also watched Juno, a movie that even if not a lot of people on GW (me included) fell in love with,won an Oscar. I'm sorry Diablo, your witty dialogues and cute moral won't save you from a weak plot and scareless scenes.


And, from Wikipedia:

Film critic Roger Ebert enjoyed the film, dubbing it a "Twilight for boys" and saying "as a movie about a flesh-eating cheerleader, it's better than it has to be".He gave the film three out of four stars.

 ​  What the hell are you smoking Roger ? A bad horror movie gets 3/4 and a good, if flawed on certain aspects, scifi movie gets 2/4.
But hey, like they in the movie "I've read it on wikipedia so it's true."

haha now I want to read ebert's twilight review

I don't think we should be too critical of his movie critiques. in case you guys didn't know, Roger Ebert has high-functioning autism. this doesn't make him a particularly good film critic, but he earns a decent living and he seems to enjoy himself.

fuck that i'd have at it with demon fox rubber or no!!!

haha now I want to read ebert's twilight review

I don't think we should be too critical of his movie critiques. in case you guys didn't know, Roger Ebert has high-functioning autism. this doesn't make him a particularly good film critic, but he earns a decent living and he seems to enjoy himself.

it's just unfortunate that people seem to think of him as some sort of authority on films, despite the fact that he knows next to nothing on the subject. it wouldn't surprise me if he is actually blind and deaf and biologically unable to watch movies and has just been faking it for years.

it's just unfortunate that people seem to think of him as some sort of authority on films

He kinda was back in the days but recently, he is starting to slip. His hardcore fans still believe everything he says but a lot of people started noticing a change in his writing style.

I generally tend to enjoy the films he hates, so I find him useful.

I watched Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky last night, and it's the most insane display of violence and hilariously bad voice acting I've ever seen (watched it dubbed).

"You've got a lot of guts, Oscar!"

Congratulations, that's a great film

I watched Pandorum last night (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/).  It was a solid sci-fi horror flick.