Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark were better movies from von Trier than Melancholia, although I'd much prefer Melancholia to the crap most people watch in the cineplexes.
Too depressing with nothing else happening. Not me. I wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't free lol. I mean it was decent for what it was. Just not the right amount of entertainment for me to be worth my 7 bucks thank you. I however, love those endings that end in nothing but a stiff silence.
Gone A pretty awful thriller that was only slightly better than your average Law and Order or CSI episode, which isn't saying much. Amanda Seyfried is ridiculously hot, but she needs to star in some better movies. The only movie of hers I can really recommend is Chloe because she gets naked and has lesbian sex with Julianne Moore.
We Need to Talk About Kevin Whenever some nutjob goes crazy and shoots up a school, people always wonder what kind of parenting and home life they had growing up. This movie basically attempts to answer this question. It's heavily implied that some people are just born rotten, sociopathic pieces of crap, and that even with decent parents they'll still come out bad. It seems like the mistake parents of these kind of kids make is that they try to act like everything is normal instead of getting their kids the psychiatric help they really need. The pushover father in this movie played by John C Reilly is a perfect example of this.
God Bless America It had a few funny bits, and some good points about the decline of American culture, but a lot of it went too far and ultimately it feels like a tasteless piece of b-movie trash. Still, some of it like Westboro Church members and Fox News commentators getting mowed down is pretty damn entertaining, and it's probably worth a watch just for that even if it is kind of a mess.
I wish I could have performed one of my famous transorbital leucotomies on him. I've been wanting to see this because I heard Swinton was superb (not that surprising if true; she's quite talented).
Spoilers There's a part where he burns out his sister's eye with drain cleaner after murdering her pet which also made me want to take an ice pick to his skull. Thankfully they don't actually show it, but we do see the aftermath. By the end of the movie you'll hate Kevin with a fucking passion. And the worst part is that there are a lot of real Kevins out there, like the VA Tech shooter, Columbine shooters, the guy in Norway, or the guy in Arizona. And what the fuck do you even do with someone like that who's just rotten to the core? They have no conscience, no empathy, and no remorse, so there's no moral center in them that you would ever be able to get through to. Just lock them up and throw away the key I guess.
I decided to rent it and just watched We Need to Talk About Kevin. People with Conduct Disorder/ APD that severe typically take care of placement on their own. They usually land an early sentence in prison. There really isn't much that can be done with the most severe cases. Kids and adolescents with strong antisocial tendencies are frightening, especially when they have above average intelligence. You just get the sense that they are eventually going to do something terrible, but you don't know what they'll do or when. I've met a few kids like Kevin, although none were quite as sadistic and extreme in severity. The lack of empathy and joy they sometimes seem to get from bringing misery to others can be chilling. From the latest neuroimaging journal articles I've read, they apparently exhibit very limited activation in the limbic system and have lower mass in key areas of the frontal lobes. Their reward system and encoding of emotions are a mess. Thus, even with vastly improved technology, I don't see things improving much regarding treatment of severe APD. It doesn't help that even the milder cases of APD tend to think they know more than everyone else and never think they did anything wrong. Even when caught, they'll say someone else did something worse and got a less severre penalty and the world is just out to unjustly persecute them. I was impressed that the writers apparently did their homework regarding early developmental markers and early conduct problems, which gradually developed into the callous, manipulative, and sophisticated behavioral patterns of APD. The movie was well acted and directed. Tilda Swinton seems to be great in just about everything I've seen her in lately.
I'm not a fan of watching depressing films about people I'll want to murder by the end. I think I'll give this happy tale a miss.
Downfall An impeccably well made film about the final days of the Third Reich. Some of Hitler's meltdowns are so over the top, they end up being unintentionally hilarious, hence the youtube meme based on this film.
Hitler assembed a team of some of the most ruthless psychopaths in modern history. The Goebbels really murdered their own 6 kids near the end, too. The rendered them unconscious with morphine and then killed them with cyanide. Someone who can murder their own 6 children is barely human. And one who can serve as a key figure in the murder of 15 to +20 million is not human.
There's a parody of that scene in that film Iron Skies. Nazis from space! An amusing film but I can't help but wonder where the ISA are.
@AKS The film gives you a real sense of Hitler's personality. He can be superficially charming and caring with friends and family or his German Shepherd Blondi, but then he'll suddenly fly into a vicious rage or become completely delusional. Sociopaths are already dangerous, but what made Hitler unique was that he was so incredibly charismatic and a great public speaker. People really wanted to follow him all the way to the bitter end.
Lost in Translation It was boring and pretentious. It's an hour and a half of pretty much nothing happening, and the two leads have no chemistry. ScarJo looks really hot in a few scenes, Bill Murray is his usual likable self, and it has some nice cinematography of Japan, but none of those things could save it from being a really "meh" movie. Adaptation Good performances from some of the supporting actors, but Nick Cage is his usual hammy, over the top self and seems seriously miscast. Eyes Wide Shut The scenes involving the secret society of perverts were legitimately creepy and well done. Unfortunately, much of the movie feels like filler and it tends to drag. I think with better editing, this could have been the creepy, sexy thriller Kubrick was going for, but as it stands, it's just kind of a mess that's about an hour too long. I can't really get too down on Kubrick for the bad editing though considering he croaked right after they finished filming.
I've been watching a series of documentaries by Louis Theroux. He gets himself into some strange situations, including going to some rather dangerous situations in Johannesburg, South Africa. He also made two documentaries with the Westboro Baptist Church and another with a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Tom Metzger. Theroux is a liberal atheist who seems to have just enough charm to avoid being beaten up or worse by the crazy people he interviews. A skinhead clearly planned to assault him and tried to trick him into turning off his camera; he wisely decided it was time to leave before anything else happened. He interviews a maniac murderer in Johannesburg he privately thinks may be joking or exaggerating about his crimes before his guide tells him he's a wanted criminal who just had his picture in his paper because the police were searching for him. There's no way in hell I would have gone into some of these places, particularly the slum areas in South Africa. The police are so awful they hire private security who beats their victims senseless with weapons or just form a mob of their own and stone the suspect and burn his body with gasoline. I'd recommend search the interwebz for him if you haven't seen his work. He's very entertaining.
Mulholland Drive This was one of the better psychological thrillers I've seen. It also had some fantastic sex scenes. The plot is non-linear, and two of the characters, Betty and Diane, are meant to represent aspects of the same person, so I'd probably have to watch it a second time to get all of the nuances of it.