Movie/film thread: resurrected

Saw Bride Wars last night , with Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway...Hudson sooooo sounds and looks like her Mum in this film.

Was a good chick flick, with lots of 'unknown' Hollywood hunks......I was in heaven 

Enjoyed a couple of series shows ("Rosemary and Thyme") from the UK.  Lady sleuths, "of a certain age", whose main business is horticulture.  Good for an afternoon's light viewing.

Started watching Mad Men, set in the early '60s, from the same people who did Sopranos.

It feels a bit 'flat' to me, the characters don't seem to have additional dimensions and the treatment of women is too stereotyped.  But it has a level of interest that makes it passing OK.

BUT ... 30 more minutes and I will have finished downloading 'The Hollowmen' from OZ TV, and a day more and "Black Books" should be finished!!   

"The only reason I've watched so many movies and TV shows is due to Netflix."

They have Netflix in China?  How reliable is it and do you have the same selection as in the US? 

Has anyone watched the HBO series "The Wire".  It's superb.  Not quite up to "Deadwood" standards but excellant none the less.  I wonder what Chinese students would think if they saw the season that was devoted to the inner-city, Baltimore, middle schools.  They'd probably give us up for lost and switch out of English classes altogether.

IME Chinese people hate watching anything western which is at all 'realistic'.

Absolutely. When I show my students stuff of this nature, I usually get the response "We Chinese don't like to talk about the dark things in life."

 BTW I started watching The Wire on recomendation of someone on this forum(Spahgetti I believe). It's pretty damn good. The screen writer is coming to Beijing next month to give a speech at The Bookworm.

"The only reason I've watched so many movies and TV shows is due to Netflix."

They have Netflix in China?  How reliable is it and do you have the same selection as in the US?

I'm not sure that Netflix is in China. I'm still in the States, and for awhile, I didn't have cable. Netflix was my option. If I were in China, I would rely heavily on streaming. Sorry for the confusion, A-Train

Absolutely. When I show my students stuff of this nature, I usually get the response "We Chinese don't like to talk about the dark things in life."

 BTW I started watching The Wire on recomendation of someone on this forum(Spahgetti I believe). It's pretty damn good. The screen writer is coming to Beijing next month to give a speech at The Bookworm.

Thing is, they like 'dark' when it's Chines.e  I watched Blind Shaft with my wife which is REALLY bleak, and she loved it.

I think they want films about the west to all be sugar candy.

I have a graduate student who asked me if I had seen, Cannibal Holocaust. Films rarely get bleaker than that.

I just saw Rambo this evening, while getting a new tattoo. Holy shit, it's the Rambo film. Hundreds die, bodies fly and body parts are everywhere. I've seen far harder stuff, but for a mainstream, "R" rated film, it definitely lives up to the kill-crazy Rambo mythos far greater than all previous entries, and it was actually pretty damn good. Far more grindhouse than that Tarantino film of the same name.

Finished Mad Men - if they make another season I certainly won't bother watching it.

Just finished watching Lurhmann's 'Australia'.  Not as bad as I'd read about, not as good as it could have been. Brandon Walters was really good as Nullah.  But worth watching.

In the middle of watching Teng Ge'er's "The Black Steed'.  Also good in its own way.

Finished Mad Men - if they make another season I certainly won't bother watching it.

There is more than one season of the show in production.

I've got 2 terrabytes of movies I brought over with me.

Tonight's hard drive feature:

the original, unaired BBC version of Alan Clarke's Scum. It's a grim look at seventies era British borstal life, staring a young Ray Winstone. I have seen the second version, which Clarke produced once the Beeb put the hammer down on the version they commissioned. Some of the suits got antsy about the content.

I watched Seasons 1 and 2 of mad men.  Enough.


Just started The Hollowmen.  really good Aussie wind-up thingy.  20 mins in and I am rolling on the floor.

....the original, unaired BBC version of Alan Clarke's Scum.

Available from Amazon.com, on same disc as re-shot, "even more shocking" [sic] second version. R rating.

Quote from: Spaghetti on February 22, 2009, 06:42:50 AM

....the original, unaired BBC version of Alan Clarke's Scum.

Available from Amazon.com, on same disc as re-shot, "even more shocking" [sic] second version. R rating.

Yup. The Blue Underground discs. That's where I ripped my copies from.

Alan Clarke was a great dramatist and his name is often ignored or forgotten in many film circles because his stylistic choices were restrained, but his subject matter was always compelling, though distinctively British. A lot of his theatrical releases internationally were actually films for British television, so perhaps that's why his work is rarely brought up in film journals. His rather obscure status is certainly not because of a lack of talent, that's for sure.

If you want well produced, well written, well acted drama, the name "Alan Clarke" as director is a guarantee of good stuff. He's dead, though, so his body of work is rather small, when compared to contemporaries like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.

 I'm really, really, really, really trying to cut back on buying DVDs, and have been doing a good job of it, but my fall off the wagon yielded six movies:

The Whackness (a gift for a friend)
Where Eagles Dare
S. S. Camp Women's Hell
a subtitled copy of CJ7
The Filth & The Fury: A Sex Pistols Film
and Uwe Boll's Vietnam war flick, Tunnel Rats, which I expect to be something like Ed wood directing Apocalypse Now.

I will fall back off the wagon for good quality discs of Step Brothers and Pinapple Express, but hope to stay on the wagon outside of those future indulgences.