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JOEY.F
Gym climber
It's not rocket surgery
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Aug 28, 2011 - 02:05am PT
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Just finished The Reckoning. Excellent.
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Byran
climber
Merced, CA
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Aug 28, 2011 - 02:29am PT
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Just finished watching Sanctum, the James Cameron caving movie that came out earlier this year. Pretty bad, but not nearly bad enough to actually be good (like Cliffhanger). Just a bunch of cliches, bad writing, and an obligatory climbing scene in which there is a lateral dyno and they cut the rope.
Oddly enough, it did make me want to go caving.
Edit: Also watched Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (the 3rd one) yesterday. I would have edited it down to be a half hour or so shorter, but overall it's the most focused (and least full of shit) of the Zeitgeist films.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
^^it's free to watch if anyone's interested.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Aug 30, 2011 - 01:51pm PT
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Kagemusha
"Kurosawa made Kagemusha after a decade of personal travail. Although he is often considered the greatest Japanese director, he was unable to find financial backing in Japan when he first tried to make the film. He made a smaller film, Dodeskaden, which was not successful. He tried to commit suicide, but failed. He was backed by the Russians and went to Siberia to make the beautiful Dersu Uzala (1976), about a man of the wilderness. But Kagemusha remained his obsession, and he was finally able to make it only when Hollywood directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas helped him find U.S. financing.
The film he finally made is simple, bold, and colorful on the surface, but very thoughtful. Kurosawa seems to be saying that great human endeavors (in this case, samurai wars) depend entirely on large numbers of men sharing the same fantasies or beliefs. It is entirely unimportant, he seems to be suggesting, whether or not the beliefs are based on reality, all that matters is that men accept them. But when a belief is shattered, the result is confusion, destruction, and death. At the end of Kagemusha, the son of the real Lord Shingen orders his troops into a suicidal charge, and their deaths are not only unnecessary but meaningless, because they are not on behalf of the sacred person of the warlord.
The great battle that concludes the film is one of the strangest I've ever seen on the screen, if only because none of the major characters is more than an observer to the battle that will determine his fate. Kagemusha, once again an outcast, dressed in rags, watches the battle from the station of someone not allowed into the club. Even Shingen's son, now in command, observes the carnage from a safe distance, according to custom, sitting on a camp chair. What we see is not a battle that holds us in suspense, but the progress of something over which we have no control, like someone else's revolution. When, at the end, the camera pans across the quiet battlefield, we see the occasional figure of a dying soldier or a horse attempting to stand, only to fall back, collapsed, finished and forgotten.
There are great images in this film: Of a breathless courier clattering down countless steps, of men passing in front of a blood-red sunset, of a dying horse on a battlefield. But Kurosawa's last image of the dying Kagemusha floating in the sea, swept by tidal currents past the fallen standard of the Takeda clan summarizes everything: ideas and men are carried along heedlessly by the currents of time, and historical meaning seems to emerge when both happen to be swept in the same way at the same time. What one carries away from this film is not any prettified idea of the dignity of man but of man in impotent relation to historical forces over which he has little if any control."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzR87VBlaoo&feature=player_detailpage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLgN5B70bqU&feature=player_detailpage
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jiff
Ice climber
colorado
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Just saw The Help, what a good movie!
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Anastasia
climber
hanging from an ice pick and missing my mama.
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We are watching Modern Weapons... :) One of Bill's favorites! Now I want Dragon Armor, that stuff is incredible!!!
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jiff
Ice climber
colorado
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the THinG
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Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
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Casablanca last night and Casablanca again tonight. You can never get too much of a great thing!
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S.Leeper
Sport climber
Pflugerville, Texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 9, 2011 - 01:00am PT
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stalingrad 1993
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Pan's labyrinth
"The movie is del Toro’s saddest; almost every frame is permeated with sadness. When the movie opens many of the characters have already made the choices that will send them to their eventual fates – in fact it could be argued that Ofelia is really the only character still making active decisions throughout the movie. But even she’s sad; besides being unhappy with her new stepfather and her new home, Ofelia is getting to the age where she’s expected to leave childish things behind. She’s too old for fairy tales, everyone tells her, yet she still finds herself drawn to them.
Ofelia's escape from her gloomy surroundings begins with the gentle housekeeper, Mercedes, who befriends the lonely, frightened girl and shows her the mill's abandoned garden, which has a labyrinth as its most interesting feature. Ofelia explores the labyrinth, and within its walls finds a remarkable fantasy world lorded over by a Faun, who sends her on a series of increasingly difficult tasks in order to prove that she is really a lost, enchanted princess who lost her way from the fairy realm centuries ago. Through the fantasy of the labyrinth and the adventures Ofelia finds there, she will come to terms with her fears and with the monsters of both her real life and her imagination.
Dark, dreamlike and dangerous, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a fairytale every bit as scary and moving as they were always meant to be. In both the real world - civil war-riven Spain - and the fantasy underworld she discovers, our heroine Ofelia must battle against the most twisted, nightmarish evils to survive. Transcendent, passionate, full of beauty and endlessly affecting. Pan’s Labyrinth does “speak to the poetic and the brutal in man,” part angel part beast."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqYiSlkvRuw&feature=player_detailpage
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Gal
Trad climber
a semi lucid consciousness
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Thanks for reminding me of "Pans Labyrinth", I have heard it is really good, started to watch it, now going to finish it.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Gal,
It surely is a remarkable film, a film that will stay with me forever. I have watched it three or four times till now.
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S.Leeper
Sport climber
Pflugerville, Texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 9, 2011 - 05:00pm PT
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I love Pan's labyrinth!
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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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I know it's dumb, but I really like "Tremors"
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Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
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Sep 10, 2011 - 03:25am PT
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StahlBro... Nothing wrong with that film! A fun piece of popcorn entertainment.
Tonight was Pearl Harbor. I was there a few days ago so it made sense to see what Michael Bay did with the event. I am surprised I had not seen this film before.
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Sep 10, 2011 - 03:28am PT
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Mary Poppins.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Sep 10, 2011 - 04:17am PT
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I saw Pan's Labyrinth in the theatre, with my then 17 yr old daughter. Brilliant, Fascinating, if disturbing. I have a copy on DVD tht I recently acquired and I haven't been in the right frame of mind at the right time to watch it yet.
I wish the Del toro/ hobbit project hadn't fallen through.
Just saw hitch,may watch Machete...
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S.Leeper
Sport climber
Pflugerville, Texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 12, 2011 - 06:54pm PT
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just saw the '69 True Grit, good stuff!
not sure which one I like more.
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S.Leeper
Sport climber
Pflugerville, Texas
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 12, 2011 - 07:10pm PT
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has anyone seen Contagion?
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