Now Watching, Films/ movies discussion Options

[Olen]

We have a music discussion thread but seem to lack a film (movie if you're from that bit of the world) discussion. The idea's pretty self-evident: what films have you seen recently, what did you think of them? Fairly similar to another thread really...

To start, I watched Gomorrah (2008) for the second time last night. It's a really good bit of Italian film-making and centres arouind the problems faced by Naples throught the stories of a few people whose paths cross with the organised crime there. It certainly doesn't pull punches in terms of the gritty reality from the first scene and a fairly grim ending.
Some of the settings are brilliant too, there are scenes shot in some buildings which look seriously run down in Naples which leads to a good degree of accuracy.

Overall I'd give it 8/10.


So what's anyone else watching?

[SubRosa]

I saw The Road a few days ago. An excellent post-apocalypse movie that focuses on a father trying to protect his son (born after the apocalypse). It does not go into details about what kind of apocalypse it was, although nuclear is heavily implied given the night where the sky was lit up like fire. It does not really matter though, because the focus of the story is not the event, but rather the two characters.

The director makes excellent use of color to reinforce the bleakness of the new world, or perhaps I should say the corpse of the old world. Everything set in the present is dull and muted. Lots of browns and greys. Fields are filled with detritus of crops, and most of it looks like November, cold, but without the pleasant white blanket of snow. The sky is a neverending sheet of grey clouds. There are often strange rumbles in the distance, of earthquakes perhaps, and great plumes of smoke. The occasional flashbacks to pre-apocalypse stand out in stark contrast, being filled with vibrant color. Showing us that this was a time when not only the world, but the characters, were more alive.

It is a pretty grim tale, with the father trying to hold onto his humanity in world with precious little of it left. Cannibals are a constant threat, and make for some very chilling encounters. Not a super-action movie, there are no heroic battles with evildoers, just a desperate race to escape and survive. Often this happens as others fall victim. The scene in the basement still stays with me. Just plain creepy.

My only complaint is that like many movies seem to be these days, the dialogue is mixed very low, with Viggo Mortensen especially talking in raspy whispers most of the time. The rest of the sound is mixed higher, so it is very hard to hear what people say. Turning up the volume does not help because then the rest of the movie is too loud. I had to watch it with the subtitles on, otherwise I would have missed half the dialogue.


I also saw The Crazies yesterday. Another good movie starring Radha Mitchell (I love her, she always plays strong characters and does not have giant fake boobs and a zillion dollars of plastic surgery. She would make a good Teresa I think.) A remake of a Romero film, it is a fun horror movie about a government-created virus accidentally loosed upon a small town. As the local sheriff and his doctor wife try to figure out what is going on, the government moves in and throws a black bag over the entire area and everyone in it. It has shades of Half-Life there, as the infected people are not the only danger, but the soldiers quarantining the place as well.

One thing I liked about it was that while the virus made people homicidal, in its early stages there were no physical signs of it. So anyone could be infected, and you would not know it until they tried to kill you.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jul 5 2010, 07:58 PM