Recent content by Chanticoblues

2018 is a weird one, because the best American film I saw released in the year was made in the 70's by a dead guy. Sorta puts things in perspective. Have to say that China had a good year though: Ash is Purest White, An Elephant Sitting Still, Shadow, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Hidden...

1. In the Hands of a Puppetmaster 2. Smoking/No Smoking 3. Blue 4. Carlito's Way 5. D'Est 6. Frameup 7. Calendar 8. The Last Bolshevik 9. Green Snake 10. Sonatine Honorable Mentions: -Groundhog Day -Dazed and Confused -Food -Parpaillon -Life -Red Rock West -The Tree, the...

1. Distant Voices, Still Lives 2. A Tale of the Wind 3. Dead Ringers 4. Die Hard 5. Bird 6. The Age of Success 7. Frantic 8. The Thin Blue Line 9. Wuthering Heights 10. Ariel Honorable Mentions: -Landscape in the Mist -They Live -My Neighbor Totoro -Cane Toads: An Unnatural...

Certified Copy It's Such a Beautiful Day The Wolf of Wall Street Hill of Freedom The Life of Riley Phoenix The Forbidden Room Chevalier Sieranevada Staying Vertical Something like that? A top 20 would be more comfortable for me probably.

Birdman made me feel like I walked through a portal into a theater on a planet where people think that sort of thing is good. I felt completely alienated by it. Just an ugly, tired movie with nothing to say.

Sure. You could probably name just about any non-English language film and it could be considered overlooked by American movie-goers. It just seems redundant to me to do so, because if you're even watching a film from a different country, it's likely that it's pretty well-known over there or on...

That wasn't my point. I watch far more non-English films than I do films in English. My point is whether a film is overlooked isn't easy to judge if you don't account for its popularity in the country of origin. An example: Marketa Lazarova isn't, relatively speaking, a widely known film, but...

A little unfair. I imagine most people here are Anglophones, if not American, and it can be hard to judge if something is overlooked if it's actually popular enough in its country of origin---which isn't always easy to know.

I think a lot of the movies I like would be considered overlooked by a lot of people. One that always puzzled me with regards to its reputation was Chameleon Street. Something didn't catch on there, and I'm not sure why.

After Life. It's a Japanese film by Hirokazu Koreeda about service workers in a kind of purgatory before heaven. Heaven is actually just a memory of your choosing from your life that you relive for eternity, and these workers stage and film the memory so you can take it with you. It's a...

My favorite 'famously bad' movie is either 1941 or Ishtar. In that I think they aren't bad at all; they're actually great. Same goes for Heaven's Gate, but I like it a little less than the other two.

whoa settle down there

It depends on the project. It's usually pretty easy to see if an adaptation is out to make a buck or capitalize on a fanbase. If someone adapted a Steinbeck novel or something it would probably be because they care about the material, or have an interesting idea for transforming it in a visual...

Yeah, I'm pretty over it all. I think we'll see the general public start to turn on them a bit too. The DC films are already treated skeptically, MCU is often criticized for samey character arcs, and the most talked about superhero flick at the moment is a kind of post-superhero film (Logan)...

I'd say out of the three black-led films that received nominations, Moonlight is the least Oscar-y, and the least broad. It would have been remembered well without Oscar traction.