Treeroy's Quinquennial Quaesitum - a Quaint Queue of Quintessial Films | Quibble away...

[75Live]

Is the 2005 V for Vendetta really no good?

 

no we were talking about the tv show called V.  Not the movie called V for Vendetta.  They are completely different   They made an updated V televsion show that sucks

 

 V for Vendetta is the movie I was saying you should watch

 

even if you wind up not liking the film

Edited March 24, 2015 by 75live

[Plain Old Tele]

Is the 2005 V for Vendetta really no good?

No, it's pretty solid.

[Avatree]

50.

 

Timo Vuorensola's

IRON SKY

 

Starring: Christopher Kirby, Gotz Otto, Julia Dietze, Udo Kier

 

Box Office: $0.1M

Rotten Tomatoes: 36%

 

 

"The Great Dictator, by Charlie Chaplin. It is one of the world's most famous short films, which illustrates in ten minutes

his wish that one day, the entire world will be held in the great Führer's wise and gentle hands."

 

Here at number #50 is proof that in this day and age, if you want to make the most ridiculous film imaginable, then you can. After unsuccessful attempts to get financing from studios, and eventually produced through an online campaign of crowdfunding and participatory cinema, Iron Sky really had no right to be any good. And by many people's standards, it isn't. But the truth of the matter is, the film manages to sustain its ridiculousness long enough for me to take it seriously. For the uninitiated, the idea is that in 1945, the Nazis fled to the moon. In 2020, they are invading the earth. Jokes are fired off by the second, and whether they're about how the Nazi officers have never seen a black man before, or the idea that Sarah Palin has an exercise machine in the Oval Office, they're funny. I laughed and laughed and laughed - it's a genuinely hilarious film. At times, it verges on pretending to be intelligent, but it knows it isn't, so simply turns a political point into a slapstick gag; the film delves into very serious topics and just giggles, and it's all the better for it. The visual design is thoroughly inventive, the script is filled with effective jokes, and it acknowledges its stupidity from the beginning. I can think of few ways to spend a more fun 2 hours.

Edited March 24, 2015 by treeroy

[Alpha]

I don't have an opinion as I haven't seen it

Augustus Waters himself is quite fond of it though.

 

[4815162342]

I don't have an opinion as I haven't seen it

Augustus Waters himself is quite fond of it though.

He seems like the kind of person who buys into the laughable notion that Guy Fawkes is a model of righteous opposition to authority.

[JohnnyGossamer]

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

 I now realize where the Wachowskis took their inspiration for The Architect's verbose lip-flapping in Reloaded.

[Avatree]

49.

 

Nicholas Jarecki's

ARBITRAGE

 

Starring: Richard Gere, Tim Roth, Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling, Nate Parker

 

Box office: $7.9M

Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

 

 

"Do you want to be the richest guy in the cemetery?"

 

Arbitrage serves as a return to form for Richard Gere. He gives a layered, nuanced performance that grounds this thriller and viscerally connects the plot (which would in other hands be dull) to the audience. All of the supporting cast (in particular Roth, Parker and Marling) do a great job of lifting Gere up and enabling him and his character's nature to be shown off; it is due to these performances that we understand just how badly Robert Miller mistreats the people in his life. He's a formidable but charming character - perhaps even a psychopath - who cares about nothing but the so-called 5 most important things in the world - "M. O. N. E. Y.". Thanks to both Gere and director-writer Jarecki, we end up rooting for this despicable man, and he's a character who will stick in my mind for a long time. The film itself is a more gentle thriller - it remains engaging throughout, but it's never unbearably tense, which makes for an interesting but calmly enjoyable experience. It doesn't do anything new, but it is a properly-fashioned and finely polished thriller, the sort of which we don't see enough of these days. The film proves that Richard Gere is too young to be making some of the rubbish that he's recently been in, and shows real promise for first time director Nicholas Jarecki.

Edited March 24, 2015 by treeroy

[Avatree]

48.

 

Paul Feig's

BRIDESMAIDS

 

Starring: Kristen Wiig, Rose Byrne, Chris O'Dowd, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph

 

Box office: $169.1M

Rotten Tomatoes: 90%

 

 

Bridesmaids is one of those films which I entered having no expectations. Judd Apatow's stable of productions rarely manages to make me laugh more than twice in 2 hours, and although I like chick flicks, it didn't have the most promising cast. The film is certainly not without issues - as expected, it has the gross-out toilet humour, the lowest common denominator rubbish that infests other Apatow films. But what really surprised me was just how rarerly that stuff occurs. For the most part, it is a heartfelt comedy that really made me laugh. There's a 6-laugh test that I tend to apply to most comedies - if it makes me laugh more than 5 times, it gets a pass - but this must have tripled that figure. I just could not stop laughing: thanks to great performances by Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy and particularly the always-brilliant Chris O'Dowd, it's a remarkably hilarious film. It is at least 20 minutes too long, and I was a little frustrated by how underused some of the standouts are, however these are minor niggles. It's rare for me to fall in love with a comedy so instantaneously, but this ticked all the right boxes. Bring on the Ghostbusters, I say.

[baumer]

Bridesmaids is terrific.  I love the entire plane scene.  Not just the McCarthy stuff, but the friends getting drunk, making out, the singing, all of it.

[Avatree]

The plane scene is really great, every single one of them shines there. I still think Chris O'Dowd steals the show though. ^^

Edited March 25, 2015 by treeroy

[Empire]

I am not a very big fan of Bridesmaids. I give it a B-.

[Avatree]

Did you not laugh much?

[Empire]

Did you not laugh much?

I did the first time, but with every rewatch I laugh less. I have seen it 3x.

[Avatree]

47.

 

Peter Jackson's

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

 

Starring: Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ian McKellen, Luke Evans, Lee Pace, Evangeline Lilly, Benedict Cumberbatch

 

Box office: $258.4M

Rotten Tomatoes: 74%

 

 

"If this is to end in fire, we will all burn together."

 

When I was 9, I read The Hobbit with my class in school, and I adored it. We would draw our interpretations of the story of Smaug the dragon and share them with the class; our teacher would help us act out the dwarves' journey into the mountain lair and their laying waste to the humans. At 11, I read The Lord of the Rings, and truly fell in love with Middle-earth. Every line of the books conjured a stunning picture in my head, one that I would dream about on a daily basis, and write my own stories of Frodo and his friends. And while LOTR is undoubtedly a phenomenal saga of films, Peter Jackson's portrayal of Middle-earth and its characters didn't quite gel with the ideas that Tolkien had projected in my mind. The Lord of the Rings to me had always been about a colourful adventure; while I acknowledged and understood its dark themes, my Middle-earth story wasn't the gritty and complex epic displayed in the original trilogy. And then The Hobbit gets made... and oh my god. The Desolation of Smaug is exactly how I believed Middle-earth to be. Its bright autumnal oranges, its childlike, vibrant rivers and forests, and its light and sincere tone were my childhood stories brought fully to life on the big screen. Nostalgia aside, though, it's hardly without merits: it does an excellent job of world building, introducing us to a closed kingdom of elves and a desperate fishing community, along with Ed Sheeran's perfect original song, which feels like something a commoner in the realm would gently sing to their children around a campfire. Thorin's admirable but blinding feeling of patriotism and sorrow for his ancestors is utterly believable. Benedict Cumberbatch is perfectly cast in a role which allows him to breathe life into the terror the stoic dwarves have unleashed. And how can you not love Lee Pace's grandiose scenery-chewing performance as Thranduil?

 

It ultimately comes down to this: The Desolation of Smaug is, for me, a magical film. I know it has the depth of a toothpick. I know it can't be compared to the storytelling and characters that came a decade before. I know it doesn't engulf you with the raw power of a film like Return of the King. I simply don't care.

[Avatree]

46.

 

David Mackenzie's

PERFECT SENSE

 

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Eva Green

 

Box office: $0

Rotten Tomatoes: 52%

 

 

"Life goes on."

 

Perfect Sense is a strange, but remarkable apocalypse film in which an epidemic has broken out, causing humans to gradually lose their senses. The premise may sound like a by-the-numbers genre flick, but the film is so much more than what I could have possibly expected. It's a film which latches on to you and does not let go, and you suffer just as much as the characters on screen do. When the world loses its sense of taste, and people are stuffing any material in sight down their throats, it makes you feel sick; when people lose their hearing, the film becomes - and remains - piercingly silent. Its imagery is so successfully provocative that it hacks away at all of your own senses, not just at the characters'. Mackenzie has a clear idea of how our senses work in harmony with each other, and what they mean to us in a philosophical, rather than practical way: the movie conveys an incredibly convincing argument for what matters in the world and what makes us human. It believes that despite a world that may be crashing and burning, what is truly important is the close relationships we have with each other - something reflected in the director's choice to focus this worldwide extinction on two everyday people. Led by heartfelt, desperate performances by Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, it isn't afraid to follow through with its convictions, to their grim - but hopeful - end.

[#ED]

[Avatree]

Yeah, I know most people don't like Perfect Sense, but I thought it was really quite something. It managed to connect to me in a very different way from the norm.

[Ethan Hunt]

DoS is better than RotK.

[Empire]

DoS is better than RotK.

[Ethan Hunt]

RotK and AUJ are the two Middle Earth that I don't love