where he fights all of thos sk8er bois in the warehouse near the start? Theres a bit where he does a Neo-style backflip of a pane of glass which gets smashed up straight afterwards (all in slo mo), stuck in my mind. Ong bak just didnt romance me in the same way as Warrior King (or whatever you want to call it), the purity of the plot (WHERES MY ELEPHANT!!!) is fantastic. Much smaller body count in Ong Bak.

Also liked Unleashed. The moves in Warrior King were better though I guess.

Its like;

Enter the Dragon or Way of the Dragon? 

The Crying Game (1992) - well, I don�t really know what I actually thought of this as a whole to be honest. I found the first act which deals with the kidnapping of a british soldier by the IRA and the eventual bond that forms between one of the captors and the hostage to be poorly written, unconvincing and lazily made. Then the movie makes a complete right turn (and if you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about), becomes far more interesting with its characters, and the level of scripting improves drastically.

Its easily the strongest section of the film thanks to the acting and writing, which excels in its dialogue despite issues with pacing and flow. And then all of the good work is again undermined when the movie brings back the IRA subplot towards the end, leading to a very mundane and by the numbers conclusion.

There's definitely good stuff in here, it's just bookended with unconvincing material.

6.5/10 

http://imdb.com/title/tt0445336/

The latest movie from Swedish film maker Roy Andersson who makes movies his own way even if it means he has to take breaks in the production to do commercials in order to fund his projects.

It's very different from pretty much everything being shown on cinema today and I strongly recommend you go see it if you get the opportunity (I know it has some international distribution but I have no idea to what extent). 

300 - well I know a lot of people liked this but I thought it was an absolute disgrace of a movie. A complete and utter waste of time from start to finish.

Even the much touted style didnt impress, I thought it looked average at best and, quite frequently, just plain awful.

1/10 

If you go in expecting a serious swords and sandals drama like Ben Hur or Gladiator and you get this movie instead I can see nailing it with a low score, but if your expectations are no more than you are going in to see a live action cartoon like the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than a more middle of the road rating would seem more appropriate in my humble estimation. 

but I just didnt like the 'style'. It looked shit IMHO and the action scenes were also pretty ordinary except maybe one or two. 

the militarism and fascism? the homo-erotic Xerxes in leather and a glistening bold head? the milfy tits in the solid R sex scene? the anachronistic heavy metal battle music? Oh, well.

My off the wall complaints about the movie. 1) The Persians didn't look like any Persians I know, many didn't look like any humans that I know (this does emphasize the cartoonish nature of the movie that makes it acceptable in some sense), and 2) the milf actress couldn't project her voice worth shit while the actor playing Leonidas screamed his head off the entire time (take an acting tip from Brando and Crowe dude, a confident whisper is much more intimidating than losing your cool). 

but I was going for 'bald'. 

You're not alone, i was actually another person who didn't like 300. I went in expecting something along the lines of Sin City, i.e. very stylized visuals and characters, and story/dialog that was enthusiastically cliched. And it was, yet I still hated it.

It troubled me how I could like one movie and dislike another, yet everything I could say about 300 is also true of sin city. They both have a 13-year-old boy sensibility. They were both violent and exploitative. Both had an interesting visual style that was pulled off fairly well.

Maybe the problem was that sin city was smart enough to know it was full of cliches and caricatures, but 300 seemed very earnest about its story and its dialog. The dialog in particular felt like it had been written by professional wrestlers, and was delivered as such.

Maybe the difference was all in the directing. Rodriguez knew he was directing an over-the-top parody of comic book noir, but Snyder thought he was filming ancient greek war propoganda. So, sin city was subtly ironic and smart enough to question its characters, while 300 really believes the good guys are just and the bad guys are wicked and evil. 

...and guess who's signed up to direct Watchmen? 

that pretty much nails the likeability factor of thw two, but I still think Sin City was miles ahead of 300 in the visuals department(really all it did was turn up the contrast and drain the blue from every image).

Sin City actually has interesting camerawork, 300 just overuses the matrix slow mo on top off its high contrast imagery. I personally didnt think it had not one actually interesting bit of camerawork in it. 

oh yeah, i was going to say that too. Sin City used visuals to tell a story, 300 used them like a club to beat the audience over the head.

I think 300 had some nice looking shots, but they were always recreating a pretty storyboard and were usually showing off the prettyness rather than using them for storytelling. (same way some sci fi movies use FX to tell a story, others spend a lot of time just showing off the expensive FX) 

Fuck 300, to me more than any other recent movie it marks the point of CGI overload. How can one derive entertainment from 1,000 people fighting, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, or 1,000,000,000 if the whole thing is retarded and doesn't mean shit? Completely unconvincing, completely retarded, and having absolutely nothing to do with the source material (maybe a fault of Miller's, who knows).

An enlightening comparison to this movie I find, is Apocalypto: They actually went into the jungle and actually did the scenes and stunts, gravity behaves normally, people are sweaty and covered in muck as you'd expect, they even used subtitles, conveying willingness on the part of the director to make the audience compromise instead of compromising the material. Apocalypto may not have been historically accurate (I can't judge, knowing little about South American history), but compared to 300 it has such a different attitude towards filmmaking that I felt invested in the struggles of 10 people, wheras with 300 couldn't give a shit about the murder of millions.

Hollywood does a real disservice to humanity when it projects its tanned, oiled, hairless vision of reality onto any source material and one can't help but feel that the ignorance of the masses in general has been heaped upon by such profiteers. A certain amount of stupidity is going to be the standard, but it's decades of films exemplifying the tendencies that 300 gathers in one giant shitfest that are responsible for the ignorance of the average person, particularly in America. Unless it's something in the water, or the gene pool, one has to blame it on the culture.

Richard Dawkins (whom I previously didn't like, but am coming to appreciate more) commented on American stupidity, "These people have the vote and the rest of us must deal with the consequences." 

i love you guys 

I fucking liked it. 

it's a popcorn chewing Saturday Matin�e flick. You are taking it way too seriously. It is not G�tterd�mmerung, the Apocalypse, and the Decline of Western Civilization all wrapped in to one 90 minute spectacle, and it's inaccurate portrayal of history are no more important or damaging than the fictions Puzo built around the Italian mob or
Shakespeare likewise wrote about the British Aristocracy. 

even if my well water is contaminated with lead chips. 

alright maybe I overreacted, but the point was not that it's historically inaccurate, I don't care about that, it's just that it was so fake and dumb. I'm complaining not that they're spreading ignorance so much as that they may be spreading stupidity itself.

the whole epic thing has been so overdone it's starting to be sickening. Of all the post-LOTR epics I think only Troy was in any way decent. 

till you brought up Troy :)

Although i do plan to watch the extended director's cut over the next week or so, hoping it's better.

For my money, and this will be very hard to believe if you've actually seen the theatrical version, but the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven is actually very very good. The 50 min of extra footage shows how easy it is to completely butcher a good film. 

I saw that in a theatre when it came out, and I do find that hard to believe. That is surprising to hear, the theatrical cut seemed to meander around without a point and felt way too long.

well I will have to check it out some time. 

I thought the theatrical edition was a piece of crap, but the extended cut is excellent. 

I don't care if you overreacted, if it gets you to write awesome monologues like that! 

Deliverance (1973) - rewatch, I was a bit harsh on this last time I saw it, incorrectly labelling it a one scene movie. It's beautifully shot, well acted and the direction is tense and natural. But having said that, I still find something not quite right about the movie as a whole, just cant put my finger on it. Either way, it is, at the very least, quite a good film with some standout sequences.

7/10 

Had potential to be utterly fantastic, but ended up being just mediocre. Too many people dying in stupid ways.
However: Incredible cinematography and set design, and Underworld's soundtrack is brilliant. 

oh man, great, great fun. can't remember when i last had this much fun with a movie.

That said, i have three points to critisize:
1) There's a totally weird 'film roll missing' cut in the middle that totally stunk. It cuts off a sex scene and then starts with all previous characters united at one place (that's suddenly burning down). (esp. as the big cut makes all character introduction unnecessary anyways.)
2) It's a tad too long. Some 'shoot another few zombies down' scenes could've been left out imho - i wasn't exactly bored, but it felt lengthy
3) i wouldn't normally pick on logic flaws, but this one is more of an inner logic error: The chick with the machine gun leg suddenly is invincible when she attacks the helis with the soldiers, and all other (as well as herself in pervious scenes) are quite careful and in fear f getting shot. kind of a break of the own rules.

oh, and it receives -1 each brainlessness and no message at all penalties

8/10