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blackbonedangel
I don't know why you're bothering with this, you're probably being trolled by a moron who is a household name in FG and another guy who called you out on a holier-than-thou attitude yet dismissed Bergman as an Antonioni for 14 year olds a few posts back, claims Vertov is superior to Brakhage although in another thread we find out he's got Vertov "lined up" to see, and makes a lame attempt to trump you in obscure film knowledge by bringing Shuji Terayama into this (and I'm willing to bet he hasn't seen any of his shorts either).
[laugh]
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I've seen at least 5 films from the following directors; I took the number of stars possible by multiplying the number of films I've seen by them by 5 (using MUBI as a reference), then adding up the number of stars each film got, then divided the two.
Jean-Luc Godard 100% Robert Bresson 97.1% Alfred Hitchcock 96.3% Yasujirō Ozu 95.5% Ingmar Bergman 95% Hou Hsiao-hsien 93.3% Kenji Mizoguchi 93.3% John Ford 93.3% Akira Kurosawa 92.9% Takashi Miike 92.3% Takeshi Kitano 91.1% Werner Herzog 89% Hayao Miyazaki 87.5% John Carpenter 87.3% David Cronenberg 87.1% David Lynch 87% Terry Gilliam 87% the Coen Brothers 85% Stanley Kubrick 80% Pixar (yeah, they�re not a director, bleh) 76% Martin Scorsese 65.7% Quentin Tarantino 65.7% Brian De Palma 62.9% Dario Argento 60% Steven Spielberg 38%
Reviews
Cyrus (2010)
Ultimately forgettable
Earlier in the year I tried watching their film Hannah Takes the Stairs (or maybe that was a Swanberg film, all the mumblecore films are more or less equally worthless.) and couldn't even bear to finish it, so I was a tad bit hesitant to see this. On the other hand I'll give almost anything with John C. Reilly a chance because, as apparent in Magnolia, the man can put in a fantastic performance. Then there was the other cause of apprehension; Jonah Hill. Hollywood's new favorite fat guy couldn't make me laugh if he tried with every ounce of adipose tissue on his body.
I don't feel the need to go make this a lengthy review, so I'll keep it short & simple; the film feels like a 90 minute pilot for a sub-par sitcom. Oh man, the clingy kid is gonna make it hard for the lonely guy to get into a relationship with his mom. Granted, there are some eyebrow raising moments of light hearted creepiness, but none of these characters are really real, they're more like cardboard cutouts of what should have been. Most of the comedy is dry, and some of it works, and the rest is just not clever, witty or funny.
So, after about 80 minutes of mess the Duplass boys decide to go for heartwarming sentimentality, but the problem is Jonah Hill is incapable of being anything other than John Candy's useless brother, so in the end it all seems completely fake.
8: The Mormon Proposition (2010)
Huh, a religious sect that covets power and manipulation; whodathunkit?
Hey, did you hear the good news? Jesus Christ did in fact return to life and was here in these very United States! Also, this guy, Joseph Smith said he found some tablets in the forest or something like that, but nobody ever actually saw them other than Mr. Smith, and now he can have as many wives as he wants! Oh, you didn't hear this? Well, then you're either a logical human being or, more likely, simply not a member of the Mormon church.
So God said that one guy making out with another guy is wrong, so it HAS to be an absolute truth, right? Well, in that case once my daughter hits a certain age I'll be sure to pimp her out, that is if she doesn't mouth off to me and I stone her to death, two things that are promoted in the Bible as God's word; and lets not forget that wonderful concept of man's domination of all on earth leading to such marvelous things as species extinction and global warming (but that's just made up, right? Sort of like an all powerful being; IRONY ALERT.) In case you couldn't get the hint, I am an Atheist, have been for about 10 years now. It wasn't particularly hard work to realize that there is, was nor will there ever be a god in any sense. Sure, some of the mythology from some religions are interesting from a purely story telling aspect, loves me some Norse mythology, but to read a book and take every word written as factual truth is just beyond ridiculous and, obviously, dangerous to the rights of human beings.
Watching the documentary, and seeing the Morons, I'm sorry, Mormons go from door to door surveying people one can't help but recall the treacherous and manipulative methods of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1900s; they would go from door to door and ask people vague questions; do you love your country? do you love god? do you love your children? etc, etc. Well if you do, SIGN THIS AND JOIN OUR CLUB! and, unfortunately, a ton of people fell for this scheme. It's all about misinformation and fear, really; control the fearful and you have power absolute. Tell them that their children are in grave danger if a man is allowed to marry a man and, unfortunately, 8 times out of 10 they'll vote for whatever you're pushing. This idea that if homosexual couples are allowed to marry will bring about the demise of the United States and all it stands for, you know...the whole every man born equal thing, is so unbelievably absurd that it's making Camus role over in his grave.
I'm not a Stalinist Atheist. I don't feel that if you eliminate religion from the world it would make it a better place (I don't have enough faith in the human condition to be so naive.), you can believe whatever you want, you can preach whatever you feel to be your seriously hilarious truth (like not allowing blacks into your religion until 1978) but once you take your beliefs and use them to manipulate the public into voting for something that is in your best interest then you're a problem through and through. Really, though, it's, again, all a matter of controlling the fearful. I believe in an afterlife because I'm scared to death of...well, death; what happens after we die? Oh, nothing? Total darkness and no more? Well, that's too bleak, so I'll just believe that when I die I'll get all the tang I could ever want; hell, I'll even become a GOD after I die, but in order to get to this point that somebody made up 100 or so years ago I have to be a slave to a group of megalomaniacs.
Seriously? The documentary didn't tell me anything I didn't already know from reading noted science fiction author Orson Scott Card's appalling essay railing against homosexual rights; the fact that these people think that sexuality is a choice that can be reversed just goes to show how intensely they're living in their own little worlds, if this is the case, if something born into a human being is actually a choice....well, in that case you better start rounding up the blind, the deaf, the autistic and, gosh golly, why not the horizontally impaired? Yes, the Mormon church, proponents of eugenics: fantastic.
Oh well, no matter if the church was involved or not the people of California VOTED for the proposition to be put into play; yeah, and Hitler was elected in a democratic system.
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Hands down one of the best American films of all time
Remember the first time you tried to walk on your own? No? Yeah, nobody really does, but there were a slew of things that were a first that came after those pivotal steps that were most likely draining in varying respect and trying of every aspect of your persona; take most of these experiences and measure them up to having to make your major studio feature length directorial debut. Very few directors really genuinely get it right the first time; Lynch did with Eraserhead, Huston hit the nail on the head with his adaptation of Hammett's Maltese Falcon, and most notably Orson Welles did relatively well with what's now his best known, if, unfairly, his only really well known effort as director: Citizen Kane.
Then there's this Laughton guy. An actor who decides to give directing an adaptation of a book by the same name a shot. In the studio system of 1955 Hollywood you had to have quite a pair of balls to willfully make a film about a psychopath who dresses as a preacher with no reservations about hunting down two children with the intention of murdering them to get to the decent chunk of change their recently deceased father left them as a safety net.
Then there's the tattoos; HATE on the knuckles of one hand and LOVE on the other, he has no hesitation to divulge listeners to the epic struggle between the two base human emotions; but this is a man wholly without one and an ample amount of the other, how many other blatantly sociopath characters, dressed as preachers, can you name from an American film from the same time? What? None? Yeah, I didn't think so. Mitchum's portrayal of Harry Powell, one of the most despicable human beings in the history of cinema, is so pitch perfect that if you were to have seen him walking towards you on the street chances are you'dve run for your life or just jumped in front of a speeding car.
The film, more or less, tanked on initial release; leading Laughton to proclaim his lifelong resignation from the director's chair: thanks general film going public and useless critics of 1955. Not only does the film contain one of the best performances of the 1950's, not that everyone else is lackluster it's just that this is Mitchum's film; everyone else is background music, it's also home to some of the most stunningly gorgeous black and white cinematography since somebody decided to film a garden scene in 1888. Dually influenced by Film Noir and the German Expressionist, which gives the film its feeling of a Grimm fairy tale, films there are more memorable scenes in this one film than in the vast majority of a lot of other directors entire filmographies.
Of all films to compare this now established American classic (ain't that the way it always goes; film gets released, no one cares, 20-40 years later it's hailed as a work of art.) it, in a sense, resembles Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre because, without really spoiling Hunter there is a happy ending but the two children have gone through so much hell that it was most likely a concrete impossibility for them to grow up into mentally stable adults, sort of like Harry.