Tim's Vermeer

This actually popped up as one of netflix's recommendations and the girlfriend popped it on. It's a documentary following Tim Jenison from Newtek trying to paint a recreation of a Vermeer painting with the theory that he had been using early photographic equipment.

It's directed by Penn and Teller who If I am honest I only really know from Rebo and Zooty (Zoot zoot zoot!) and I'm not overly fussed about the art world but it was a fascinating subject and the kind of thing I could see someone like Teague doing.

Here's a recent talk by Philip Steadman who first outlined the theory about Vermeer using the camera obscura...

Make it a double feature with "Born on the 4th of July" and I'm all yours, Robbie Ray.

Violent Year is my least favorite of Chandor's three major releases so far - which is only to say I respect it, just didn't love it like I loved All Is Lost and Margin Call.   I just chalk it up to "well, that one wasn't for me" and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing whatever he does next.

REIGN OF FIRE (2002): some big names before they were big: Matthew Mcconaughey, Christian Bale, and Gerard Butler.

The movie doesn't resemble the poster-art at all. There's no 'Smaug strafing London' scenes in this. That movie is still to be made.

Most of the talking takes place underneath a castle ruin in the north of England. The tone is gritty and dark and there are a couple of decent set pieces with passable VFX shots. But poor characterisation lets it down. No one sells their character convincingly. Dramatic tension and character arcs feel forced. The script needed a second draft to clearly establish who wants what and why. And world building fantasy movies need longer running times.
And we need to distinguish humans oppressed-by-dragons from humans-oppressed-by... zombies/aliens/robots/monsters/dinosaurs/mutants. Otherwise all these movies become interchangeable.

Score: 6/10 - needs a 150min remake, with the VFX of Smaug crossed with the tone of The Road.

Last edited by avatar (2015-04-14 15:33:13)

Just saw this for the first time the other night. Agree.

Ex Machina is the good shit.

Ooh, I'm interested. What sort of thing are you thinking?

Mysterious! I'm in. Mostly for the opportunity to talk about how great Ex Machina is.

I saw most of "Fifty Shades of Grey". Was boring and bad. Not sure what I expected. It's originally Twilight fanfiction, there's lots of pop song montages to cover the lack of any substance, and no stakes or plot tension at all. At times our main heroine really comes across as another incarnation of Twilights Bella Swan, and that made me want to pull my hair out at times. Made it halfway through before I started skipping ahead (at that point, nothing worthy of mention had happened at all).

Danny Elfman's piano-driven score seems to think the movie contains scenes with emotion and occasionally charm (there is no such thing on screen), and so at times is hilariously off from what I was actually feeling. The tame music also further deflates any tension or interest a scene may have.

There are entire scenes in the film that are 5-6 lines long. Some characters are introduced and then do nothing of consequence at all.

Nothing happens. He likes her. She likes him. He wants to whip her. She isn't sure about it. They spent 1 solid hour just going back and forth on whether he gets to whip her. Finally he gets to whip her. She sobs and complains that he whipped her (which she agreed to) and that she wishes he would not have that desire in the first place (which he has been crystal clear is his desire from frame 1 of the film).
They just spent an hour of the runtime going over this again and again and again, negotiating terms, etc etc etc. This should not come as a surprise. The main female character is unbelievably weak and frustrating to watch. The entire movie exists solely because she doesn't know what she wants sexually. After 2 hours she finally figures that out, and the film then ends. The main female character has no arc at all, no change.

Christian Grey has no character. He shows barely no emotion throughout the film. At the end I was hoping, as I sat through another scene that seemed to go nowhere, that his character would atleast have some kind of arc, or some backstory would atleast give some emotional backing for the audience to understand his actions. Nope. He wants to dominate her sexually. After 2 hours she realizes she wants more than that. The end.

Sex scenes were tame as hell. I was just hoping something interesting would happen, anything. Maybe, he goes over the line at some point and causes her harm she didn't agree with. Or he realizes, to his surprise, he feels for her in a way he hasn't with anyone else before, and desires something more than just a BDSM agreement between them. Like he struggles with a duality that he has a hard time reconciling, one part wants to have a normal everyday relationship, but the other side to him desires degradation and dimination. Nope, his character is flat and one-dimensional.

Instead we spend time (again, 2 hours is the length of it) with two consenting adults without any problems to deal with other than that they obviouslt aren't sexually compatible, as they star in soft core sex scenes accompanied with top 100 pop songs. At times the film feels secondary to the music. Like the editor nagged and nagged and nagged for weeks, and finally the people involved realized that people would fall asleep if the scenes didn't feature harmless pop songs to take some focus away from the lack of substance.
Also they couldn't hire someone to do a subversive or tense, dark score with sexual or uncertain undertones. No, that would give the audience an actual point of interest. Just have Danny Elfman play some piano music, and throw in some radio tunes as if the sexual tension and acts we're seeing on screen is the equivalent of a quickie on a saturday afternoon, as opposed to the ENTIRE POINT of the film existing and the only thing our characters seem to talk about or have in common. Let's not try and somehow make that one, solitary asset actually interesting.

Last edited by TechNoir (2015-04-25 00:24:58)

But, see, if they actually covered the ground you were hoping they'd cover they'd have nothing to do in the sequel!

Thanks BDA, that totally makes up for the 2 hours.

And wow, 3 books to explore that epic character arc? I was not aware. They mention his mother in the film, but I think they may have even slightly dipped into book 2 for those hints. That hint is pretty much the only thing we ever learn of Christian Grey. He talks like an executive at a press conference throughout the film, he has some lines, but he never really says much of anything.

That content padding though might even be worse than Twilight: Breaking Dawn part 1, where we spend the first hour of the film just with Bellas and Edwards wedding and honeymoon, planning it, sending out the invitations, oh I gotta walk in these shoes since they are kind of uncomfortable new hahaha, that sort of stuff. And where everything eventually unfolds pretty much exactly as you'd expect any normal wedding would (yawn) and nothing basically happens for an hour until she becomes pregnant with a vampire baby, at which point Bella gradually becomes more and more sick for an hour (win), then Cronenberg-level horrific c-section, and Fin.
So that's 2, or even 3, whole plot points in 2 hours. It is racing along in comparison to Christian Greys character development.

A bonus thing from FSOG that highlights how toned down the film must be in comparison to the book.
Christian Grey at one point in the film says the line "... I am 50 shades of fucked up", in a very somber and serious, dejected tone. Like it has weight. Suit pants and shirt, slighty desaturated color palette, it's raining outside, muted lighting. No pop music playing. Weight-y scene.
In no way is he portrayed as that. He, I guess, lacks a "normal" sense of emotional intimacy, but at this point in the film he's basically just mildly used some whips and belts. The way the line is delivered, you'd expect it to be Patrick Bateman having a rare introspective emotional connection with another human. Not this rich Steve Jobs type without a care in the world who likes to spank women during sex.

The line probably had to stay since I assume it's lifted from the book, considering it's essentially them referencing the title, but that line comes out of nowhere, and maps to literally nothing that happens in the film.

At most he has some less-than-common fetishes and trouble with intimacy. "50 shades of fucked up" to me requires him to atleast have a couple of DWI convictions to be even remotely warranted, where you can imagine his friends or family sitting down and telling him, "dude, you need help. You behavior if fucked up right now". Or we need to see him feed LSD pills to pigeons in the park. Maybe he kicked a dog once because he was bored and just wanted to feel something, anything. I think most people would agree that'd be pretty fucked up. But what's that, you like to roughly spank women during sex? Cool, I think that was the main plot of Family Guy last week. Boy, that Quagmire is a hoot, right guys?

Frankly I'm curious if the line fits better in context with the book, or if the book is so poorly written it doesn't work there either, just for other reasons.

Last edited by TechNoir (2015-04-25 23:08:58)