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I love Open Range. I always thought the scene of the guy reading the letter, basically a will, in the barn to be quite moving.
I liked OPEN RANGE when I saw it in the theater. I don't know what's holding up a Region A Blu-ray release.
" Let's go get some grub".
Can't get more old fashioned the that!
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Solaris (2002)
Hmph … considerable time and effort was expanded here on futuristic window dressing for a sterile, bourgeois weepy.
Martinez leans on Ligeti.
5/10
Dreadful film and score.
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LIZZIE
2018
Update on Lizzie Borden story of 1892 about the daughter who took an axe to her parents and gave them 40 whacks. Painfully slow, and not a patch on the Elisabeth Montgomery/Billy Goldenberg 70s tv version.
5.5 out of 10 and 3 of those were for the lesbian fumblings between Kirsten Stewart and chloe sevigny.
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Never a 9, however good the moustaches were! Ha ha. 
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Never Look Away [Werk ohne Autor] - 5/10
The most disappointing film of 2018. Very fascinating and promising subject material: A dramatization of the life of a German artist (inspired by Gerhard Richter) who suffered through both Nazism and Communism, yet strove to find his own individual style. This could have been a masterwork of a film.
Instead, despite its generous 3-hour run time, it's all Hollywood-style cliche, easy ironies, and stereotypes. It might work as a beginners-level introduction to the history of art at this time and place (Germany 1937-1966) for 13-year-olds (despite what seems to be half the run time devoted to the artist and his girlfriend [and later, wife] rolling around naked for no particular dramatic reasons - although a reference to "Nude Descending a Staircase" is faintly clever.)
Everything is thuddingly obvious and spelled out for us. It's all quite superficial. For instance, our artist, Kurt (played with dull surprise throughout by Tom Schilling) joins a modern art academy in Dusseldorf and meets a fellow artist, the sardonic Harry Preusser (engagingly played by Hanno Koffler.) We expect the character of the intriguing Preusser to get developed and shaped during the remaining hour, but, no, he remains on the exact same charming, but superficial, level where we first met him. I prefer stories told with "jagged edges," i.e. dialogue that elucidates while nevertheless being elusive, character revealed in subtle, unexpected ways, and so forth.
I like the intent of this film, and its exploration, albeit done on a cursory level, of art, society, and individual expression. If only it had dug deeper! But perhaps it's folly to expect sophistication, wisdom or maturity from even a European art film these days.
Max Richter's score is his usual vandalizing-of-past-composers garbage. A scene in which Kurt's fragilely beautiful young aunt stands in front of a line of buses, encourages the drivers to blare their horns, and stands in ecstasy while the camera swirls around her is repeated at the film's end - this time Kurt is the one experiencing this bliss (?) Again, on a superficial level, it seems like a "nifty" effect - Kurt repeating the experience that he witnessed his doomed aunt, who haunts the film and inspires his artwork, did, but then you ask yourself - "Huh? How is this even plausible or meaningful?" Richter's score reaches a banal crescendo at this moment, Schilling gives us his only genuine smile of the film, and the frame is frozen. Cliches right to the end, when this movie could have been another "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," also a three-hour film taking place over a healthy stretch of time of European strife.
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After view to a kill last week, its living daylights tonight.
I recall it being on of the worst Bond films but i will give it another chance.
Tell phelps id forgotten how good the a-ha main title was!
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Well i know thats not true - there were 6 by Connery straight away.
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Half way thru - a kgb milkman with more bad accents than exploding milk bottles and Joe don baker doing a shocking parody. Thunderball it aint. Good music though.
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LIVING DAYLIGHTS
Not the worst Bond but a long way from the top 15! Some very silly bits indeed.
Good music. 7.5 out of 10.
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Posted: |
Aug 15, 2019 - 4:00 PM
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By: |
MusicMad
(Member)
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The Comedy Man (1964) ... 6/10
Almost a who's who of British film/TV talent at the time, with great performances from its main stars, Kenneth More and Billie Whitelaw, this is a sad tale of resting thespians in a miserable wintry London. "Does the roof leak?" ... "Only when it rains" - unoriginal but fitting for the setting.
Is is a great film (a question I often ask myself)? ... No, but it is engaging and you do feel involved with the characters, though at the end there is the question: so what? Perhaps if they had got themselves jobs instead of collecting the 67s 6d dole money (weekly?) they'd have made more of their lives.
I'd seen the film many years ago and found it surprisingly adult (lothario Kenneth More?) ... it's all so dated now but as a glimpse of London in the early 1960s it is surprisingly effective.
Dennis Price is wonderful as the sleazeball agent (today's news isn't new!), Frank Finlay looks nothing like the Casanova character he later became and it's amusing to watch Cecil Parker play a down-and-out hanger-on. The lovely Angela Douglas charms (too innocent to be true) and, happily, Edmund Purdom disappears for most of the film.
A weak musical score - often totally inappropriate - by Bill McGuffie (utilising a main theme by Clive Westlake) and others does detract at times but, to its credit, keeps the film from being too serious.
Worth watching
Mitch
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For anyone interested Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is on Uk tv tonight, Talking Pictures channel, 12.50am. Dont shoot me coz it isnt a 10k bluray supermarionation.
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