Last film watched

[rowan]

I watched the Spanish-Venezuelan production 'Libertador' - about Simon Bolivar - last night; partly out of curiosity, partly to brush up on my Spanish, but mostly out of sheer boredom as we are snowed under for a 5th straight day here in Istanbul. Again I was a little disappointed. Two hour film but the only character developed was that of Bolivar himself, really. I didn't know he had marched an international army across the Andes to catch the Spanish off guard in Venezeula and attack them from the rear, however. So I guess I learnt something...

[Numbers]

If you want a good documentary the Pacific Warriors on Netflix is good, all about the South Pacific Islands rugby teams.

"The Hunt for the Wliderpeople" also on Netflix, was good fun and I would recommend it if you like antipodean humour.

[rowan]

If you want a good documentary the Pacific Warriors on Netflix is good, all about the South Pacific Islands rugby teams.

"The Hunt for the Wliderpeople" also on Netflix, was good fun and I would recommend it if you like antipodean humour.

Thanks for the tips. Will look out for those. Right now I'm watching the Joy Luck Club (I read the book a while back and didn't really get into it). So far so good:

Update: Quite a drag in the end, actually, mostly first world problems of the rich Chinese-Americans, albeit supposedly rooted in their cultural heritage. But I stuck with it through the entire 2:18.

http://putlockers.ch/watch-the-joy-luck ... ocker.html

[rowan]

Looks interesting. I'm not much of a film watcher, but if it's based on classic literature then at least it'll have an intelligent plot...

Russian producer Svetlana Migunova-Dali (Legend No. 17) and U.S. producer Grace Loh (Hot Tub Time Machine) are collaborating on the American screen adaptation of Master and Margarita, the immensely popular and enigmatic Soviet-era novel by Mikhail Bulgakov.

"We're in negotiations right now about a huge American version, and we're counting on a great feature film with a budget of $50-$100 million," said Migunova-Dali, reported TASS.

The novel blends together the story of Christ’s betrayal, the devil’s visit to Soviet-era Moscow in the 1920s, and the tragic love story of a writer and his muse. It has been translated into over 40 languages and was made into feature films nearly two dozen times.

The idea to make the novel's latest screen adaption appeared more than a decade ago. "It was very difficult to get the rights from the Bulgakov Foundation to make the film, and now we have the audio-visual rights and have put together a strong team that is bound to succeed," she stated.

While the director and final list of actors have yet to be decided, screenwriters are already working on the upcoming script.

"Quite a large number of A-list Hollywood actors turned out to be Bulgakov fans and have expressed their interest to be part of the project," said Migunova-Dali. "We have the first version of the script. Bulgakov’s writing is complicated and we will try to interpret what he could not say openly in his time, and explain. We will try to present the film to the Western audience without losing the drama."

Currently, the film's American producer is Grace Loh, and Migunova-Dali hopes that Russian filmmakers will be involved. She expects part of the film’s shooting will take place on location in Moscow in Bulgakov’s flat.

https://rbth.com/arts/movies/2017/02/16 ... ita_703786

[Vengeful Glutton]

Seriously under-rated addition to the "Halloween" series. The synth soundtrack is amazing.

[Mikey Brown]

Seriously under-rated addition to the "Halloween" series. The synth soundtrack is amazing.

I'm very confused. That's genuinely part of a Halloween film?

[Vengeful Glutton]

Seriously under-rated addition to the "Halloween" series. The synth soundtrack is amazing.

I'm very confused. That's genuinely part of a Halloween film?

Yes, but no Michael Myers.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/ft7/Hallowee ... loween+III

[rowan]

Just watched the film adaptation of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who died recently. I think I enjoyed the book more, as is invariably the case, though the film was watchable - if mostly for Sean Connery's charismatic presence. Christian Slater is a weird-looking fellow whose main attribute appears to be the ability to assume traumatized expressions. Anyway, if you're not familiar with either the book or the film, it's best described as a more down-to-earth alternative to Dan Brown fiction:

https://123movies.is/film/the-name-of-t ... ching.html

[Vengeful Glutton]

Just watched the film adaptation of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who died recently. I think I enjoyed the book more, as is invariably the case, though the film was watchable - if mostly for Sean Connery's charismatic presence. Christian Slater is a weird-looking fellow whose main attribute appears to be the ability to assume traumatized expressions. Anyway, if you're not familiar with either the book or the film, it's best described as a more down-to-earth alternative to Dan Brown fiction:

https://123movies.is/film/the-name-of-t ... ching.html

I really enjoyed that movie. Connery's great in it.

Haven't read the book, but it's on the list now. Have you read Foucault's Pendulum ?

[rowan]

Just watched the film adaptation of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who died recently. I think I enjoyed the book more, as is invariably the case, though the film was watchable - if mostly for Sean Connery's charismatic presence. Christian Slater is a weird-looking fellow whose main attribute appears to be the ability to assume traumatized expressions. Anyway, if you're not familiar with either the book or the film, it's best described as a more down-to-earth alternative to Dan Brown fiction:

https://123movies.is/film/the-name-of-t ... ching.html

I really enjoyed that movie. Connery's great in it.

Haven't read the book, but it's on the list now. Have you read Foucault's Pendulum ?

No, as mentioned earlier, Name of the Rose is the only Umberto Eco book I've read and, while certainly readable, I wasn't sufficiently inspired to read any more of his work. Maybe in the future though...

[Numbers]

Just watched the film adaptation of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who died recently. I think I enjoyed the book more, as is invariably the case, though the film was watchable - if mostly for Sean Connery's charismatic presence. Christian Slater is a weird-looking fellow whose main attribute appears to be the ability to assume traumatized expressions. Anyway, if you're not familiar with either the book or the film, it's best described as a more down-to-earth alternative to Dan Brown fiction:

https://123movies.is/film/the-name-of-t ... ching.html

I really enjoyed that movie. Connery's great in it.

Haven't read the book, but it's on the list now. Have you read Foucault's Pendulum ?

All I remember about that film is Terry Christian on The Word asking Christian Slater if he lost his virginity in the film, that and some bush being on display.

[Edinburgh in Exile]

Watched a movie called "The Shallows" yesterday, really enjoyed it, I love a good monster shark movie, this one gets close enough.

[Vengeful Glutton]

All I remember about that film is Terry Christian on The Word asking Christian Slater if he lost his virginity in the film, that and some bush being on display.

Funny that, I don't remember Terry Christian being in it.

[Numbers]

All I remember about that film is Terry Christian on The Word asking Christian Slater if he lost his virginity in the film, that and some bush being on display.

Funny that, I don't remember Terry Christian being in it.

He wasn't it was Christian Slater or am I missing something?

[Vengeful Glutton]

He wasn't it was Christian Slater or am I missing something?

Joke. All I remember about The Word is a drunk cameraman.

Anyhoo. Stirring stuff.

[Vengeful Glutton]

and Olly Reid.

[Numbers]

Kubo and the Two Strings - Excellent
Hell and High Water - Not bad, deffo worth a watch for Jeff Bridges

[rowan]

[rowan]

Watched this tonight. Excellent documentary-film and very thought-provoking indeed. African-American author and activist James Baldwin was a good friend of both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, and says that although the two were very different, their views became much closer before their deaths. Both were assassinated before they were forty, as was another friend of Baldwin's -
lawyer and black activist Medgar Evers. Baldwin, who spend a good part of his life in exile in Paris and Istanbul, did not join either the Christian or Black Muslim civil rights movements, objecting to the manner in which both religions were segretated in the US. Neither did he become a member of the Black Panthers, regarding them as too hateful. Baldwin also talks a lot about Hollywood propaganda, and how the white men were always portrayed as the heroes, even as they wiped out the Native Americans. Black children reach a point where they look in the mirror and suddenly realise that they are the Native American themselves, he says. Hollywood has been all about self-justification and dealing with guilt, but this has prevented white America from growing up and in fact deprives them of moral justification, because all they really want is to ensure their own safety and prosperity. Baldwin died 30 years ago at the age of 63.

https://watchmovie.me/watch-movie-i-am- ... negro/hDTU

[Vengeful Glutton]

[rowan]

Looking forward to this one: https://putlocker.rs/watch/the-coming-w ... q03/5v8zjv

John Pilger’s terrific new film The Coming War on China begins with stills from 抗日战争 (Or World War II, if you like) and then cuts to General Franklin Blaisdell, former Reagan JCS and Rumsfeld shill, who delivers a Pentecostal eulogy on American military prowess and the impregnable force of Full Spectrum Dominance. The great landmass of China sits between Blaisdell’s hyperventilation and a trailer for The Mask of Fu Manchu, a striking modernist 1932 race-baiter which shows the infamous Chinese mastermind (Karloff, hissing his lisp) practicing surgical torture on the white man from his golden redoubt. Medical experiments haunt Pilger’s film. Washington’s war on China can itself be seen as a Western medical project undertaken to isolate the yellow virus. From the postwar US hire of Japanese doctors from the horrific Unit 731 to the American whitecoats who measured the nuclear effects on the Marshall Islanders, the philosophy of knife and microbe has driven the military-biological vision of wild teeming Asia.

Unluckily for the Marshall Islands, they are situated midway between the pacific coast of the United States and China. Pilger begins on the Bikini Atoll and the testing of H-bomb Bravo in 1946. Some of the darkest artifacts of The Coming War are the ruthless PSAs and army training films that show doctors scrutinizing the Islanders’ dying: measuring discolored patches, pulling out hair as if it were fuzz from a lapel, drawing blood and following the movements of the eye. Lessons in nuclear delousing – little girls used the fallout for shampoo – courtesy of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The ‘savages’ are occasionally taken back to the States for further testing, to ‘white man’s country and the iron room’ where Geiger and scintillation counters dip madly into the red. Dressed in snazzy suits, the Marshallese smile at the cameras while the experts watch their deaths and entrances with great devotion. Genetic mutations fascinate the white doctors. Signs back on the islands advertise ‘Free Plutonium Screening’. Pilger gives us portraits of magicians such as Dr. Robert Conard, the kindly AEC whitecoat with his warmth for children and his conscientious letters to the guinea pigs he has been monitoring impartially for years.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23 ... iron-room/

[rowan]

Looking forward to this one: https://putlocker.rs/watch/the-coming-w ... q03/5v8zjv

John Pilger’s terrific new film The Coming War on China begins with stills from 抗日战争 (Or World War II, if you like) and then cuts to General Franklin Blaisdell, former Reagan JCS and Rumsfeld shill, who delivers a Pentecostal eulogy on American military prowess and the impregnable force of Full Spectrum Dominance. The great landmass of China sits between Blaisdell’s hyperventilation and a trailer for The Mask of Fu Manchu, a striking modernist 1932 race-baiter which shows the infamous Chinese mastermind (Karloff, hissing his lisp) practicing surgical torture on the white man from his golden redoubt. Medical experiments haunt Pilger’s film. Washington’s war on China can itself be seen as a Western medical project undertaken to isolate the yellow virus. From the postwar US hire of Japanese doctors from the horrific Unit 731 to the American whitecoats who measured the nuclear effects on the Marshall Islanders, the philosophy of knife and microbe has driven the military-biological vision of wild teeming Asia.

Unluckily for the Marshall Islands, they are situated midway between the pacific coast of the United States and China. Pilger begins on the Bikini Atoll and the testing of H-bomb Bravo in 1946. Some of the darkest artifacts of The Coming War are the ruthless PSAs and army training films that show doctors scrutinizing the Islanders’ dying: measuring discolored patches, pulling out hair as if it were fuzz from a lapel, drawing blood and following the movements of the eye. Lessons in nuclear delousing – little girls used the fallout for shampoo – courtesy of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The ‘savages’ are occasionally taken back to the States for further testing, to ‘white man’s country and the iron room’ where Geiger and scintillation counters dip madly into the red. Dressed in snazzy suits, the Marshallese smile at the cameras while the experts watch their deaths and entrances with great devotion. Genetic mutations fascinate the white doctors. Signs back on the islands advertise ‘Free Plutonium Screening’. Pilger gives us portraits of magicians such as Dr. Robert Conard, the kindly AEC whitecoat with his warmth for children and his conscientious letters to the guinea pigs he has been monitoring impartially for years.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23 ... iron-room/

Yes, another great documentary film from multi-award winning Australian journalist John Pilger. Much of the film is based on the plight of the natives of the Marshall Islands, which the US seized from Japan in WWII and proceeded to spend 12 years testing nuclear bombs on. The bikini is actually named after the explosions, not the island. The US tested the effects on animals, and also allowed the native population to return much too early, then proceeded to conduct tests on them. Many of the islanders died of cancer, while miscarriages, stillborn births and horribly deform babies rose sharply. At one point Greenpeace was required to deport the entire population off the islands. The survivors have little doubt that they, too, were used as guinea pigs. America, which spends trillions of dollars on arms, eventually offered them 150 million in compensation, but as of yet that hasn't been fully paid. The US continues to use the islands for missile tests, with each missile itself worth around 100 million dollars. Meanwhile, now that it is safe, military staff and their families live a life of luxury with beach-front homes, golf courses and swimming pools, while the natives live in squalor on a neighbouring island, permitted only to set foot on Bikini Island to earn a meagre living as cleaners, maids, gardeners and other menial laborers. To this point the film resembles a previous documentary by Pilger on the Chagos Island natives - 'Stealing a Nation - who were forced to leave their homeland to make way for the American military base of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean (about as far away from the US as you can get). But then the bigger picture is exposed as Pilger explains how the US has come to impose hegemony over the entire Pacific region. Since WWII it has maintained a controversial base just a few hundred miles from China on the Japanese island of Okinawa, of course (which is surely the equivalent of the Soviets putting missiles on Cuba). The locals are against their presence, and there have also been a number of high profile cases of rape committed by American soldiers. Meanwhile, the US has also been increasing its military presence in the Philippines, according to Pilger, although this is disputed by American officials. Regardless, there can be no doubt the objective is to pen the Chinese in, just as NATO bases in Europe and the Middle East have done the same to Russia & Iran. But what exactly is the threat from China? Aside from long-standing claims over Tibet and Taiwan, they've shown no inclination for territorial expansion and invasion of other countries. And while it may be a one party state, it is pointed out there has been more political change in China since WWII than there has been in the US - because billionaires cannot manipulate the state party the way they do the two major political parties in the US. China is a market economy and now the world's second largest economy. In recent decades it has lifted almost half its population out of povery (600 million people), and created more billionaires than America. But the 'Yellow Peril' propaganda continues. This all began during the Opium Wars, of course, when the US was very much in league with the British in imposing the trade on the Far East. It funded the American industrial revolution, and in fact Franklin Delano Roosevelt's own grandfather made the family fortune from the trade. When the Chinese rebelled, they were put down savagely. And it was foreign invasions and interference which ultimately brought about the Communist Revolution, so despised by the West.

[Vengeful Glutton]

Pelham 123 (Original version)

[Vengeful Glutton]

Looking forward to this one: https://putlocker.rs/watch/the-coming-w ... q03/5v8zjv

John Pilger’s terrific new film The Coming War on China begins with stills from 抗日战争 (Or World War II, if you like) and then cuts to General Franklin Blaisdell, former Reagan JCS and Rumsfeld shill, who delivers a Pentecostal eulogy on American military prowess and the impregnable force of Full Spectrum Dominance. The great landmass of China sits between Blaisdell’s hyperventilation and a trailer for The Mask of Fu Manchu, a striking modernist 1932 race-baiter which shows the infamous Chinese mastermind (Karloff, hissing his lisp) practicing surgical torture on the white man from his golden redoubt. Medical experiments haunt Pilger’s film. Washington’s war on China can itself be seen as a Western medical project undertaken to isolate the yellow virus. From the postwar US hire of Japanese doctors from the horrific Unit 731 to the American whitecoats who measured the nuclear effects on the Marshall Islanders, the philosophy of knife and microbe has driven the military-biological vision of wild teeming Asia.

Unluckily for the Marshall Islands, they are situated midway between the pacific coast of the United States and China. Pilger begins on the Bikini Atoll and the testing of H-bomb Bravo in 1946. Some of the darkest artifacts of The Coming War are the ruthless PSAs and army training films that show doctors scrutinizing the Islanders’ dying: measuring discolored patches, pulling out hair as if it were fuzz from a lapel, drawing blood and following the movements of the eye. Lessons in nuclear delousing – little girls used the fallout for shampoo – courtesy of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The ‘savages’ are occasionally taken back to the States for further testing, to ‘white man’s country and the iron room’ where Geiger and scintillation counters dip madly into the red. Dressed in snazzy suits, the Marshallese smile at the cameras while the experts watch their deaths and entrances with great devotion. Genetic mutations fascinate the white doctors. Signs back on the islands advertise ‘Free Plutonium Screening’. Pilger gives us portraits of magicians such as Dr. Robert Conard, the kindly AEC whitecoat with his warmth for children and his conscientious letters to the guinea pigs he has been monitoring impartially for years.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23 ... iron-room/

Yes, another great documentary film from multi-award winning Australian journalist John Pilger. Much of the film is based on the plight of the natives of the Marshall Islands, which the US seized from Japan in WWII and proceeded to spend 12 years testing nuclear bombs on. The bikini is actually named after the explosions, not the island. The US tested the effects on animals, and also allowed the native population to return much too early, then proceeded to conduct tests on them. Many of the islanders died of cancer, while miscarriages, stillborn births and horribly deform babies rose sharply. At one point Greenpeace was required to deport the entire population off the islands. The survivors have little doubt that they, too, were used as guinea pigs. America, which spends trillions of dollars on arms, eventually offered them 150 million in compensation, but as of yet that hasn't been fully paid. The US continues to use the islands for missile tests, with each missile itself worth around 100 million dollars. Meanwhile, now that it is safe, military staff and their families live a life of luxury with beach-front homes, golf courses and swimming pools, while the natives live in squalor on a neighbouring island, permitted only to set foot on Bikini Island to earn a meagre living as cleaners, maids, gardeners and other menial laborers. To this point the film resembles a previous documentary by Pilger on the Chagos Island natives - 'Stealing a Nation - who were forced to leave their homeland to make way for the American military base of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean (about as far away from the US as you can get). But then the bigger picture is exposed as Pilger explains how the US has come to impose hegemony over the entire Pacific region. Since WWII it has maintained a controversial base just a few hundred miles from China on the Japanese island of Okinawa, of course (which is surely the equivalent of the Soviets putting missiles on Cuba). The locals are against their presence, and there have also been a number of high profile cases of rape committed by American soldiers. Meanwhile, the US has also been increasing its military presence in the Philippines, according to Pilger, although this is disputed by American officials. Regardless, there can be no doubt the objective is to pen the Chinese in, just as NATO bases in Europe and the Middle East have done the same to Russia & Iran. But what exactly is the threat from China? Aside from long-standing claims over Tibet and Taiwan, they've shown no inclination for territorial expansion and invasion of other countries. And while it may be a one party state, it is pointed out there has been more political change in China since WWII than there has been in the US - because billionaires cannot manipulate the state party the way they do the two major political parties in the US. China is a market economy and now the world's second largest economy. In recent decades it has lifted almost half its population out of povery (600 million people), and created more billionaires than America. But the 'Yellow Peril' propaganda continues. This all began during the Opium Wars, of course, when the US was very much in league with the British in imposing the trade on the Far East. It funded the American industrial revolution, and in fact Franklin Delano Roosevelt's own grandfather made the family fortune from the trade. When the Chinese rebelled, they were put down savagely. And it was foreign invasions and interference which ultimately brought about the Communist Revolution, so despised by the West.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40376673

Pilger's a lefty liberal fruitcake, but I did like that documentary. He did another very good one about the aborigines in Arnhem land, who were re-located ostensibly to eradicate systematic child abuse. Turned out that the allegations were fabricated; the Australian state were really interested in the mineral wealth the locals were sitting on.

[Vengeful Glutton]

Hacksaw Ridge

The sprinkling of schmaltz didn't take anything away from this fine movie. Gibson's done some great stuff.