oh I sure had/have hopes, and as an otaku ascendant wapanese, there are few good mangas and movie adaptations I didn't see. ^_^ but such movies are always difficult moments for me. as a fanboy, the anticipation is huge. and as a fanboy, disappointment also hits me harder than anything else. I'm fairly emotional about those stuff somehow despite my cyborg brain and ears I need to be a fine soulless objectivist.
oh well I'll see it when I can, if I had been a true fanboy I would have tried to see it at the Cannes festival when it was projected. I live 40mn away in earth time, or 6hours in festival time. trying to get there and back while the festival is ON is like real life Gravity. you can't tell when you'll see your family again . I wasn't brave enough this year.
I always thought Cannes was nigh on inaccessible to Joe Public. A couple of friends went, back in about 2000 I think, and even then they said you pretty much had to be an industry insider to get tickets for anything. They didn't get to see a single a film the whole time they were there - spent most of it in the bar, ogling the glitterati from afar!
eheh, indeed it's not really interesting aside from hopefully seeing some famous people passing by. but my uncle is sort of a small local celebrity(cartoonist), so he usually gets invited to most stuff and if I beg hard enough, I could come along sometimes and ruin his day^_^. doesn't solve traffic though and getting a room on site must get pretty crazy I'd imagine.
The Austrian Alps provide the dramatic setting for this dark tale of persecution and derangement in 15th Century Europe. Albrun lives with her mother in an isolated hut, high up on the snowbound slopes. Her life is a dark one, having to contend with her mother's failing health and erratic behaviour, as well as the stigma of being branded a witch's daughter by hostile locals. This snapshot of Albrun's early life comprises the first chapter of the film; the remaining three show her as a young woman, deeply troubled and living a lonely life as a goat herder, still struggling to come to terms with the damage of her childhood.
There are parallels with Von Trier's Antichrist - in the themes as well as the look and feel of the film - I think it's obviously a big influence on director Lukas Feigelfeld. As a first proper feature, and by all accounts a student project, it's remarkably accomplished. The atmosphere created by the visuals is sublime, evoking a strong sense of the Gothic through beautiful photography of the naturally ominous environment, and is complimented by meticulous sound design and an intense, brooding drone score. It won't be for everyone, it's not an easy watch: there's minimal dialogue, the narrative structure is loose and the darkness doesn't let up. Anyone looking for a straightforward story will be disappointed, as it's as much an exercise in tone as it is storytelling. The pacing is very measured throughout, almost to the point of being excruciating, but that only seems to add to the exquisite torture of this dark gem.
It's always a bad sign when you're sitting in the theatre thinking about how much longer you have to endure a movie for. I actually enjoyed the duo's previous offering, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, which was a great giallo homage, but this one just felt hollow. There's an emphasis on visual impact and style; the film is shot through with primary colours and a constant barrage of images, but that's pretty much all there is. There's very little plot and next to no character development (heck, I couldn't even tell you the names of any of the characters by the end of it, much less care about anything that was happening to them) and for some reason, the film insists on telling you the time every few minutes: screen cuts to black, 17h28 in block red letters, back to the action, screen cuts to black, 17h33... etc. The plot, such as it is, centres around an artist in her Mediterranean retreat, who seems to have something of a cult following. Three men staying with her pull a heist on a gold truck, and take the bullion back to the retreat. One proceeds to double-cross the others and the rest of the film is basically one big shoot out in a fight for the stolen gold. There are lots of stylized flashbacks to the artist's earlier life and many self-consciously arty camera angles deployed to convey the action, maybe to distract the viewer from noticing that it's otherwise just endless gunfire interspersed with being told the time. I'm really not sure what Cattet and Forzani were trying to do here, but whatever it was, it really missed the mark with me.
Found a decent deal (black friday will tell ) and thought why not I only have two televisions and a VR headset in my house sure I need another one!
I must say I am really floored by it even before spending much time calibrating. Just running ISF mode disable all "enhancements". I do have a Samsung Plasma that I always thought was decent way ahead of any high end LCD no matter price class I ever looked at but this is an entirely different league also to my brothers Kyro. Incredible contrast and the 4K resolution really pays off. I sit about a metre away and have no SDE effect. 55" is still a bit small even at this distance but I really can´t afford the bigger and I fear there might be some SDE on the 65".
Ambilight is really convenient to have. Now I am thinking of getting hue lamps.
VR headset now have competition for best movie set. The virtual cinemas is really nice but the resolution handicap has never been more visible. Future belongs all to VR headsets though just can´t beat the immersion factor. Dark swedish nights and it get pretty damn dark over here but there is still a difference between 100 % occlusion of real world and 95 %.
I am inclined to agree with you on Geralds Game. If you are a King fan or a fan of the psycho horror genre it really is not to be missed. Still stand by my solid adherence to the two best B list actors ever in Greenwood and the contiunaully over exposed and under scripted Carla Gugino. Cannot help but wonder if they po'd Wienstein at some point in there carreers to merit the treatment they have gotten. Or perhaps good agents and script selections were a priority. At any rate you will find quality performance by both here .
On the subject of HiDef TV's. I was in a venue over the weekend (Thanksgiving over here and not much the rest of the world understands((Bloody Colonials)). Anyhow. I was watching The Hobbit on two different tv's of the same screen size. I found the lower res set to portray the film much better as when I switched over to looking at the hi res screen it looked like old BEEB 70's sci fi shot on videotape, stark, edgy and the sort of so actual it lost it's realism. First time I have ever been able to view an entire film while contrasting the two resolutions and really the higher def made me wish to the days of projected film in the home. The final result was me walking away thinking "Jeebus, but there are a whole lot of films I LOVE, and really do not ever want to see shown in that medium.
Which tvs was it? I can´t say anything but at sharpness at 0 and all "picture enhancements" off it look amazingly natural. There is some upscaling going on on 1080p source material but it does a good job on it.
I haven´t purchased Hobbit dunno if Netflix have it. As for netflix is it able to sort out all it´s 4k/hdr content from the rest?
At least around here, the TV's in the stores are usually really badly configured, with maximum brightness, contrast, all the "enhancements" etc turned on, resulting in awful picture quality.
I have a 55" OLED television at home, "only" Full HD, but the image quality is still absolutely stellar. No going back from that.
Really hard to say anything about this without giving it away; it's one of those films that it's best to go in knowing as little as possible beforehand. I will say it's a film of two halves and I feel the first half is considerably more successful than the second. My main issue is a technical one: the use of sub-standard CG - really detrimental to the film - but I have to give the filmmakers credit for trying something different here and pulling it off at times. I particularly like the genre splicing - the way it moves from social realism to something else entirely and then something else again. It's flawed, but definitely one of the more unusual films I've seen this year.
Dreary dystopian sci-fi that puts its anti-science (anti-GM) agenda front and centre. Visually and thematically, it takes its cues from Tarkovsky's Stalker but it's really a pale shadow of that masterpiece. Aside from some lush black and white cinematography, there's little else to recommend this - unsympathetic characters, leaden dialogue and clumsy exposition, containing biblical allusions to things like the burning bush on Mount Horeb. I think it's supposed to convey Erol's spiritual awakening and his journey to enlightenment, but coming out of the film, I felt like I'd just attended a long sermon in a particularly austere and joyless church.
A crime thriller from brothers Eshom and Ian Nelms (who I must confess I'd never heard of before) based around an alcoholic ex-cop who stumbles across a new trail and can't give up the scent, becoming embroiled in a seedy affair that shouldn't concern him. It doesn't really break any new ground - there's shades of the Coens and early Tarantino in there - but also never puts a foot wrong: tightly scripted and well acted throughout, with a great eye for detail and enough of its own identity to stand out from the crowd. It's by turns funny and dark, but the shifts of tone are all perfectly judged and as with watching a Coens film, you always feel you're in safe hands. First time I've ever seen the director(s) shake every single audience member's hand and thank them for coming on the way out of the theatre too - the Nelms brothers seem like a classy pair!
........after having the book, the MIDI file of the soundtrack, all the missing soundtracks, redone soundtracks........the late 1990s video game, the misleading orchestral 1982-LP and the DVD of countless editions plus missing the print or re-showing of the print..........
This on a 65 inch UHD HDR in DTS 1080p is most likely the closest I'll ever get?
A not-quite-horror that re-imagines the myth of Iphigenia as a modern-day morality tale. This was my introduction to Yorgos Lanthimos (missed last year's The Lobster) and if this is anything to go by, he likes to take certain traits from horror but doesn't want to make a full-on genre film. It's certainly got a distinctive style, particularly in the stilted, monotone way the characters deliver their lines which adds another layer of strangeness to what is already a pretty weird animal. Barry Keoghan is at the heart of the weirdness and delivers a brilliantly off-kilter performance in a film that balances black humour and uneasiness with an ever-present sense of menace.
Not vintage Haneke I would say, but even on his B game, he's more interesting than most. You recognize the visual style instantly, as it features several of those long static shots, with key action taking place at the far extent of the frame. As for the story, it's an intelligent, multi-layered drama of family dysfunction that revisits many of Haneke's favourite themes: bourgeoise malaise, social inequality, surveillance and voyeurism (this time through the prism of social media, which he clearly wants to take a pop at), euthanasia, and communication breakdown. In fact, there's so many strands to this that the ideas feel a little bit under-explored and the overall effect is an intriguing sprawl - it keeps you hooked but it's a little unfocused. The intrigue is there because it's very stingy with exposition and expects the audience to do some work in joining all the dots. Unsurprisingly, there's no happy end.
Based on the true life story (up to a point!) of writer and first time director Ana Asensio, who also stars in her own film. It's an engrossing slice of life through the eyes of an immigrant struggling to make ends meet in NYC. You know it's going to wind up in a dark place, but the actual scenario that unfolds is inventive, keeps you guessing and by the end, leaves you wanting more.
As an antidote to the day's darkness, Guillermo del Toro's latest offering - a Truman-era Cold War fairy tale. Amélie meets Creature From the Black Lagoon in the story of a lonely mute girl who finds love in an unexpected place. The main creature is obviously an homage to the one in Black Lagoon but it's also trademark del Toro, as is the whole movie, with great set design contributing to a pitch perfect evocation of Atomic Age sci-fi. I've always got time for Michael Shannon and the presence of his bad-to-the-bone villain, Strickland, stops the film from becoming too sentimental as he casts a long shadow over proceedings.
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. I wasn't brave enough this year.
) and thought why not I only have two televisions and a VR headset in my house sure I need another one!
