Movie/film thread: resurrected

"THE GIVER". Starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep.  Apparently Lois Lowry's award winning science fiction novel for young adults, is a favourite of Jeff Bridges. He has apparently been waiting to make a film of it since it was published in 1994.  To my way of thinking, it was watchable, but a review I read, couldn't understand what drew Jeff Bridges to the book so passionately.  I'd be interested in the views of some of you guys.

The movie is watchable. It suffers some from being the third such movie in recent times. The book was written before either of The Hunger Games or the Divergent books, but the movie feels very familiar if you seen both of their adaptations already. As a movie in its own right, it feels like they backed off making it as stark as it could have been. With personal attachment being the key to the utopia/dystopia, it seems like they could have placed more value on the meaning of experience. Otherwise, the utopia seems really quite pleasant. But it includes people like Jonas's father, for instance.

Basically, the first third felt like Divergent. The middle third with Jeff was pretty good, though plagued by the very poor aesthetic choice of smeary slo-mo. I found the last third a bit shallow, a little like Hunger Games on the cheap. The memory payoff at the end was cool though. /no spoilers.

Z-108

Somewhere in Taipei they're cloning Shu Qi. All the clones that lived, and were willing to take their shirts off, starred in this movie. It may not have been worth it. This movie has a lot of pointless meanness, a great deal of shouting, and zombies. By and large, the zombies are nicer than the people.

 

Thanks Calach!

Presumably the book was better. As a movie, The Giver was, I think, a bit immature. I suspect the book may have a bit more kick to it.

I just watched The Giver and went "Meh" (and I've stopped taking my injections).   

Thanks for the input guys. It's good to know that it is not just me and/or a female perspective.

Bio-Zombie (1998)

Where Z-108 was mean, Bio-Zombie is generous and entertaining and, eventually, has zombies. Two dudes, Woody Invincible and Crazy B, have a VCD shop in an arcade (looking a lot like upstairs at Chungking mansions) and one evening collecting their boss's car from the repair shop they encounter the last survivor of a criminal exchange gone wrong, and that dude has in his possession what his boss was trying to buy, an Iraqi bioweapon that turns people into flesh-eating zombies. Win!

Or, in short, Cantonese comedy-horror with elements of farce (and once the horror starts it seems like the movie takes a long time to end).

 

Begin Again (2013)

Honestly, it's kind of an extended iphone commercial. I have never seen a movie with this amount of pop polish. Not that it's a bad movie. I don't really buy Keira Knightly as a musician, but the story's inoffensive and the soundtrack jaunty. It has Stevie Wonder

 

Turns out though, it is her doing the singing.

Like a Fool: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzg1ODExNjc2.html
Lost Stars: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/s8EB6of0TaY/
Tell Me If You Wanna Go Home: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzU4MzU4NTA0.html

A Million Ways to Die in the West

An unfunny case study in using "fuck" and "shit" as placeholders for humor. I got the impression that were they simply removed, the movie would improve. Not as a matter of tone, just as a matter of how heavily layered each scene is with "shit" and "fuck". For the rest of the movie, I laughed once every hour, and the mustache conceit was kind of funny. Also, Seth MacFarlane is funny-looking.

 

The Scribbler

In the vein of Sin City and Sucker Punch but with less mythic narrative and fewer visual effects, though a smidge more surrealism. A girl half-cured of multiple personality disorder goes to a halfway house where residents keep killing themselves and she might be next if she can't finish her treatments. Was okay.

 

"THE MAZE RUNNER" :  Just saw this 2014 American Science Fiction thriller based on James Dashner's 2009 book of the same name. I understand that they are already working on the sequel.  Have you seen it yet Calach or ETR or anyone else who might like this type of movie? I'd be interested in your perspective. 

The Maze Runner's been in my book queue for a long while. (I read a few pages and haven't come back to it yet.) The movie though is yet to be pirated. I did however see something that might interest you, Gran: a very imperfect movie from Tommy Lee Jones...

The Homesman (2014)

It's the light and lush story of transporting three frontier women back home. Ostensibly, the women break under the strain of 1850s Nebraska frontier life. When no man can be found to do the job, another woman, Hilary Swank, volunteers to carry the three "back east" to a sanitarium. Coincidentally she rescues a claim jumper from a hanging and co-opts his help for the journey. This movie does for westerns what Only God Forgives did for martial arts, except the tone is really odd considering how harsh the story.

Verdict: a bit weird; did it go wrong or does the cavalier tone have meaning?

I'll keep an eye out for "THE HOMESMAN" at the movies.

Mardaani (2014)

Stylized Indian action drama with Rani Mukerji as Shivani Shivaji Roy, a police officer in Mumbai who decides to break up a syndicate of human traffickers.