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Some love here for John Goodman in Flight. I like John Goodman in general but this particular performance I found clownish and negatively distracting. Detracted from the movie for me.

Just my opinion.



As for The Master, I find the term "poetic garbage" to be a pretty good one. In reading discussion from the criticky types, there is a lot of talk about how Phoenix's behavior in such-and-such scene made sense because it was set up by such-and-such foundational scene earlier. Omygawd it's amazing! A guy whose flaws are fairly consistent!

And my reaction is, yes, every single person on earth is the sum of stuff that has happened to them. Figuring that out for one random guy and hammering at it on film does not make you a genius. You still need to be going somewhere with it.

Just showing it for the sake of it, is nothing but busy work.

I mean, the film does go somewhere. It just happens to be a fairly shruggable place in my estimation.
 
Harling Mays: [to a nurse] Honey, could you hustle us up a couple of daiquiris and a cocktail weenie? On second thought, just bring the booze, I brought my own weenie. Oh, she's offended. And she should be. I'm a pig. And I hate me. That's what we have in common, nurse Rached. We both hate me.

:lol:

I'm easily amused.
 
Mudcat
As for The Master, I find the term "poetic garbage" to be a pretty good one. In reading discussion from the criticky types, there is a lot of talk about how Phoenix's behavior in such-and-such scene made sense because it was set up by such-and-such foundational scene earlier. Omygawd it's amazing! A guy whose flaws are fairly consistent!

And my reaction is, yes, every single person on earth is the sum of stuff that has happened to them. Figuring that out for one random guy and hammering at it on film does not make you a genius. You still need to be going somewhere with it.

Just showing it for the sake of it, is nothing but busy work.

I mean, the film does go somewhere. It just happens to be a fairly shruggable place in my estimation.
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Yep, exactly what I was getting at there. I was more or less left at the end going "and??" I guess it might be my own fault for expecting more out of the script but it was barely there to begin with. The individual performances were good nonetheless so I gave it a decent mark overall but I felt the whole movie really lacked the emotion that the main characters were achieving on their own. And at the end I just went, okay, well that's that mattress man.
 
What is the proper thing to do about accents anyway? Like when you are doing a movie in English when what you are showing really happened in some foreign language.

I ask because I noticed some critic getting uppity about the new movie Phantom - which is about something that happened on a Russian sub - but all the actors are just speaking normally - i.e. American accents. The critic made special negative note of that.

WTF are they supposed to do? Speak English with a fake Russian accent? Would that make you happier?

Maybe.

Coincidentally, not 20 minutes later, I started watching The Last Station which also has a bunch of Russians magically speaking English. Except in that one they all have English accents - except for one which is Scottish. I bet no one complained about that.

Didn't Anne Hathaway do a British accent for her role in Les Liz - which was a French story? Like she actually faked the wrong accent? I think so. And she did win an Oscar.

Maybe that's the answer.

British accent = :yes:

American accent = :nono:
 
Another reason why Inglourious Basterds is one of the best movies of all-time. It didn't just brush off linguistic realities and made everyone speak English out of sheer laziness. (Nor did it improvise pseudo-French and pseudo-German like a lot of filmmakers do. The language used was true-to-life.)

Killing Zoe is another Tarantino movie that dealt with the language issues really well. Eric Stoltz is in Paris and he's annoyed by his inability to understand French. As he would be in real fokken life.

I'm not saying everyone should do that, cause it can't be efficient or cheap to cast the correct people all the time.

But I dunno. I can't watch Les Miz in part for that silly everyone-magically-speaks-English treatment. Also because there's absolutely no good fokken reason for this novel-turned-musical to be turned into a movie-musical. They shoulda just done a movie and spared Russell Crowe the crushing humiliation.
 
I don't mind the concept of people speaking English (when they really aren't). It's such a common thing in so many movies, it has become a disbelief I can suspend completely. At least it is no less unnatural to me than reading subtitles.

I am fairly tolerant of subtitles - moreso than most average movie-viewing folk, I'm sure. I have known many people who will refuse to watch any movie with sub-titles - and I'm sure there are dire box office realities relating to that. But that aside, if you can just do it in English, I prefer it.

But I just wonder about the rules. It seemed so ridiculous to complain about the American accents. Not because it was an American critic, but just because. But I really think I've got that right. British is what you are supposed to do - not matter the actual language. For whatever reason.

But it did strike me as funny to have that one Scottish accent mixed in.

I don't know what I want.
 
Mr. Rogers has a message for all the haters.

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I'm quickly running out of TV that I watch. Series anyway. I still watch The Daily Show and 60 Minutes and Jeopardy - or as I call it, Jep-Slam! I catch PTI once or twice a week.

But a dwindling number of series.

I still watch The Simpsons but it is pretty atrocious.

Family Guy
South Park
Downton Abbey
Shameless
Girls
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Dexter
The Newsroom
Veep


I think that's about it - and a few of those are hanging by a thread. A couple are about to end. Plus it seems like we only get like 12 new episodes a year of most of those. There is nothing happening more often than not.

TV is elbowing its way out of my life.
 
The Last Station (2009) - before seeing this I knew nothing about Count Leo Tolstoy besides the title of a few books I haven't read. Now I know something.

First of all, his name was Lev. I don't know why that gets translated as Leo. Lev.

Second of all, apparently he was something of a living Saint in his homeland who founded a pseudo-religious/social movement which attracted many followers - called Tolstoyans - and influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King among others.

So that is interesting to know. This movie has educational value. However in terms of entertainment value, I found it just so-so. There is an uninspired love story between a couple of helpers which is given a lot of play - but I just found it contrived and irrelevant and really hard to care about. Tolstoy's wife, the Countess, is a shrill and annoying drama-queen - even if she has a valid central complaint.


I hope for the sake of the Russian people there is a Russian language film with Russian actors covering Tolstoy's legacy and I hope it is better than this. He is an important figure there.


I rate The Last Station 6.1 out of 10


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I am curious (for some ridiculous random reason) what actor I have seen in the most movies. So I think I will erratically look into that over the next indeterminate period. I am inclined to think it would be an older leading man like Deniro, Nicholson, Pacino - but who knows, maybe it is some supporting guy like David Paymer.

And just to set some rules and conventions: TV, mini-series and voice work on animation do not count.



I recently had reason to check a couple for unrelated reasons. Not that I would expect them to be right at the top here but nevertheless here are those results:

Denzel Washington - 31
Michael Gambon - 27

And today I shall look into, oh let's randomly say, Julianne Moore . . .

28



By gawd that was so exhilerating I think I'll do another. Let's do the aforementioned David Paymer . . .

21 only. He's done a lot of TV.




Are we having fun yet?

And how.
 
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