Which movie did you watch today and how would you rate it?

[excreationist]

Good Fortune
Keanu Reeves is an angel who makes a guy living in his car and a rich guy switch lives. I liked how the characters discover how bleak life can be for the working poor - yet the main character had to truly want to live his old life. I really enjoyed it and the social commentary and some humour.
9/10

 

[Shadowy Man]

Saw a Cohen Bros. movie I had missed, A Serious Man. Seems a retelling of the Book of Job, and it jumps from dybukks to quantum mechanics.

I liked it but my friend didn’t. He thought it was too slow. It started slow for me too but then went to zany Cohen overdrive in the second half. 6/10.

Hadn’t heard of this one. I have found the Cohen brothers really hit or miss with me.

 

[pood]

Saw a Cohen Bros. movie I had missed, A Serious Man. Seems a retelling of the Book of Job, and it jumps from dybukks to quantum mechanics.

I liked it but my friend didn’t. He thought it was too slow. It started slow for me too but then went to zany Cohen overdrive in the second half. 6/10.

Hadn’t heard of this one. I have found the Cohen brothers really hit or miss with me.

Yup. It hit with me but missed with my friend. But it wasn’t hitting with me either until the second half of the movie when it went batshit crazy.

 

[pood]

There is a lovely scene in which the protagonist, a Jewish physics professor haunted by dybukks, is explaining the quantum uncertainty principle to a seminar of bored college students. As they walk out on him his nemesis walks down and, against a gigantic blackboard of mathematical equations, grabs him and beats his his head against the blackboard and yells, “I’ve been fucking your wife!”

Talk about your uncertainty principle!

 

[Swammerdami]

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Once again, I have to say They don't make 'em like they used to.

Just in case you don't know, the story is about a baby born as a decrepit old man who then proceeds to get younger as the years go by.
...
9/10

Interesting. I looked this up and says it was based on a short story by Fitzgerald.

I am not familiar with that story, but I am with Time of Passage by J.G. Ballard, which explores exactly the same topic.

I will put this on my to-watch list.

There's an interesting novel by Martin Amis -- Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence -- which uses a different but related(?) trick. The trick is revealed right away, so I'm not spoiling the novel: A powerless narrator inside protagonist's brain perceives and narrates with time reversed. Has anyone else here read this novel?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

BTW: My memory was never too good and in late middle age (or does 76 finally push me over to "old"?) it's gotten worse. I had to watch the trailer to realize I'd already seen A Serious Man.

 

[pood]

Rewatched Amadeus after several years. A cinematic gem but historically wildly inaccurate, so I have mixed feelings about It. I have real qualms about turning a historical character, Antonio Salieri, into a villain when there is no evidence that he was. The movie also suggests that his music was mediocre but again the historical evidence suggests otherwise. He certainly was successful in his lifetime and Beethoven was a student, as was Mozart’s son. I see no reason why you can’t make a movie about Mozart without making shit up and retroactively slandering a real person.

 

[Swammerdami]

Rewatched Amadeus after several years. A cinematic gem but historically wildly inaccurate, so I have mixed feelings about It. I have real qualms about turning a historical character, Antonio Salieri, into a villain when there is no evidence that he was. The movie also suggests that his music was mediocre but again the historical evidence suggests otherwise. He certainly was successful in his lifetime and Beethoven was a student, as was Mozart’s son. I see no reason why you can’t make a movie about Mozart without making shit up and retroactively slandering a real person.

I agree with your sentiments. Shouldn't the producers have placed a disclaimer somewhere in the credits?

Amadeus is one of my favorite movies, but I was never interested in Mozart's bio, and never even wondered about the movie's fact/fiction ratio! (Do I seem like an incurious fellow? I AM a curious guy(!) but I limit my curiosity to darting off in 700 different directions, not 7000.)

I love the movie because I love to listen to the music. (If ONLY listening to Mozart's music without video and a story to focus on, my attention would drift.) I saw a quote by a highly respected mathematician: He calls only three people "geniuses" -- two were perhaps the very greatest 20th-century mathematicians; the 3rd was Mozart. I'm not qualified to judge but I feel that Mozart's music is incomparable.

I find it fun to curate my own personal list of Favorite Movies. Amadeus is in My Top 20, but ONLY because of the music. Across_the_Universe (2007) is a splendid romantic tale which deserves more than its 7.3 IMDB score anyway, but it makes my Top 20 because of its music. 34 Beatles songs, none sung by the Beatles. Bono and Cocker each sing a song, but mostly the singers are the new young actors themselves who sing marvelously.

But I am NOT generally a fan of musicals. Only 3 or 4 conventional musicals make my Top 100 List.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

Rewatched Amadeus after several years. A cinematic gem but historically wildly inaccurate, so I have mixed feelings about It. I have real qualms about turning a historical character, Antonio Salieri, into a villain when there is no evidence that he was. The movie also suggests that his music was mediocre but again the historical evidence suggests otherwise. He certainly was successful in his lifetime and Beethoven was a student, as was Mozart’s son. I see no reason why you can’t make a movie about Mozart without making shit up and retroactively slandering a real person.

I liked and still like Amadeus. It's a film, not a documentary. I forget the word for word quote, but someone once said that the greatest sin a filmmaker can make is the failure to entertain. Amadeus was an entertaining mix of drama and comedy with a little bit of historical context. The cinematography coupled with the costume design was like watching a classical painting in motion, much like Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. It was also well written and excellently acted.

It didn't win 8 Oscars for nothin' (back when the Oscars gave awards to only the best movies).

 

[pood]

Rewatched Amadeus after several years. A cinematic gem but historically wildly inaccurate, so I have mixed feelings about It. I have real qualms about turning a historical character, Antonio Salieri, into a villain when there is no evidence that he was. The movie also suggests that his music was mediocre but again the historical evidence suggests otherwise. He certainly was successful in his lifetime and Beethoven was a student, as was Mozart’s son. I see no reason why you can’t make a movie about Mozart without making shit up and retroactively slandering a real person.

I liked and still like Amadeus. It's a film, not a documentary. I forget the word for word quote, but someone once said that the greatest sin a filmmaker can make is the failure to entertain. Amadeus was an entertaining mix of drama and comedy with a little bit of historical context. The cinematography coupled with the costume design was like watching a classical painting in motion, much like Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. It was also well written and excellently acted.

It didn't win 8 Oscars for nothin' (back when the Oscars gave awards to only the best movies).

Yeah, you’re right, but as I say, I have mixed feelings. I believe most people who view the movie will tend think it is more or less historically accurate, without checking the facts, and this is an injustice to the historical figure Salieri. And that’s a good point about a classical painting in motion and Barry Lyndon. Still, though, I can’t but think you could have made a successful historical comedy/drama that stuck more to the facts. In addition to all the other gross inaccuracies, I discovered that Mozart’s wife never left him and his son was born four months after he died. Still more research revealed that the roots of this movie go back to an 1830 Pushkin opera.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

The Matriarch

White collar lady is a drug addict and alcoholic who is long estranged from her mother. After 20 years she ends up going back to the village where apparently everyone is supposed to have not aged due to mother having control over and/or being subject to an evil force. This is peculiar because no one is young/youthful. There are a lot of old folks and no one children or even anyone in their teens or 20s.

It deals with themes like addiction, but White Collar Lady doesn't struggle with it at all when she arrives at the village. It deals with childhood trauma and does it pretty well with respect to dealing with pain of trauma and wounds that won't heal.

It's a very uneven film. It's sometimes interesting while at other times it's an absolute slog. It feels like two editors brawled over how it should ultimately be put together.

Horror Rating: 6/10
Non-Horro: 5/10

 

[pood]

Speaking of movies reconstructing history, a few months ago I rewatched Oliver Stone’s JFK. What a stupid bunch of dishonest bullshit. Almost every scene in it was inaccurate.

OTOH, I rather like his movie NIxon, even though it also contained glaring historical inaccuracies. But I liked it mainly for Anthony Hopkins.

 

[pood]

And I very much liked his movie W.