What Movie Are You Watching Or Watched Today?

[Clash Cadillac]

This movie is worth watching !
http://www.iamthedoc.com/

[PureIrishPunk]

I've been watching LOTR with the cast commentary

[Low D]

We just finished season 4 of Sons of Anarchy, which has been referred to as "The White Trash Sopranos", but I'd say this season is really more "The White Trash MacBeth".

I love this show. And fuck, who knew that Katey Sagal (as Lady MacBeth) could act? Who knew anybody from Married... with Children could act? But she is the highlight of the show for me, along with the older guys, Piney and Bobby.

I realize i meant to say it's really "The White Trash Hamlet" (tho' there are echos of MacBeth). The interesting thing is, it's my spouse what corrected me, which is funny as she's never read/seen either. Dang, she's clever.

[Frances]

Pete Smalls Is Dead


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roz8qZdCmnU

Just watched a bit of the Golden Globes. Managed to see Peter Dinklage win his award. He's great.

[Mike from Boston]

I watched "Cold War On Ice", a documentary about the '72 Summit Series between Canada and The Soviet Union. As a younger hockey fan, I really enjoyed this. A great doc. about a big moment in international hockey that I really didn't know anything about. Plus it was on right after the winter classic. Hockey + Eye Black and Blimp-Cam = Awesome, I don't care who's playing.

I saw this the other night. Thought it was really well done. Though I knew Paul Henderson had scored the Series winning goal, didn't realize he had scored the winners in the two previous games. As a Bruins fan, it was good to see the focus on Espo-his play and leadership really won it for Canada. Also as a Bruins fan, don't understand how Dryden sucked so bad.After all these years, it is sad how the real villian in hockey turned out not to be the Russians, but rather Alan Eagleson

[Frances]

[old barney greyheron]

Started watching 'Barney's Version' last night but got side-tracked, so i'll try again tonight.

[Christine]

Looking forward to Coriolanus. The trailer makes it look like Call of Duty!

[RoddyRuddy]

The Darkest Hour
Five young people who find themselves stranded in Moscow, fighting to survive in the wake of a devastating alien attack.Really enjoyable film.
Reminded me alot of The Day of the Triffids .

[philipchevron]

http://www.irishcentral.com/ent/Histori ... 11648.html

A terrific new resource.

Just saw The Iron Lady. Awful movie, ineptly written and, for the most part, well impersonated but poorly acted.

[Talrainla]

Tá gráin agam Thatcher fós

[philipchevron]

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

Though The Artist almost certainly deserves its 10 Academy Award nominations, a win in the Best Movie or Best Director categories would lend to the historical record of the Academy a somewhat skewed view of just how good 2011/2012 was for the movies. It is, at best, a pleasing metamovie that avoids the trap of postmodern irony in its assimilation of numerous vintage movies - Singing In The Rain, Sunset Boulevard, Lassie, A Star Is Born and Top Hat merely commence a lengthy list - and tells a simple rom com story well, and with a shrewd and affectionate attention to detail. Its best aspect is how it plays with ideas of silence and sound and makes you realise just how shockingly far we have come, as a society, in accepting an unending soundtrack of noise pollution in our lives since the days when even silent movies demanded live piano or orchestral accompaniment.

Maybe it's because I actually still regularly watch silent movies that I failed to find the novelty in this picture. Tonight I will be watching the first ever surviving feature-length (ie more than 4 reels) American movie, Richard III (1912) and, though this does have a delightful Ennio Morricone score which was pasted onto the 1996 restoration, it remains very much a silent movie in its expression and visual power, something The Artist inevitably fails to pull off entirely in our more knowing era.

Oscars? Well, Thatcher aside, the instance of tour-de-force characterisations of the mentally ill is on the low side this year, so Hollywood is quite likely to reward its second favourite topic. Itself.

[philipchevron]

Speer and Hitler ["Speer und Er"] (Heinrich Breloer, 2005)

The British are sometimes accused of an unhealthy and needlessly prolonged fascination with World War Two. Leaving aside that there remains plenty still to be fascinated about - the archives are still letting loose their secrets - I have noticed that actually, the subject is of even greater interest to the people of Germany. Moreover, they have even greater cause for forensic scrutiny than the Brits. The 50 million fatalaties of that war aside, and their loved ones, nobody suffered more in the Third Reich than the Germans themselves. Which is why work like this, a 3-part docudrama, is so enthralling. But Speer and Hitler is, even by the standards of German self-investigation, in a class of its own.

Part dramatic reconstruction (Sebastian Koch is especially good as Albert Speer), part archive-trawling (the footage of the Nuremberg Trials and Speer's media interviews after his release from Spandau in 1966), and part reflective commentary (Leni Riefenstahl is particularly terrifying as she recalls the golden days, her bizarrely made up elderly face constantly resembling that of a rag doll about to explode), the film's coup de grace is its recent interviews with three of Speer's surviving children, all remarkably garrulous and candid for people with such extraordinary lives and all genuinely compelling as they try to make sense of their father's contribution to history.

I'm old enough to remember a time when Speer, the architect of Hitler's absurdly scaled Germania and, almost by accident, his armaments minister too, was considered, if not quite a "good" Nazi, then one who had somehow escaped the monstering of Goering, Goebbels, Eichmann and the rest. Personable and reasonable, his post-Spandau remaking of himself as a man who "could" have known about the Holocaust if only he hadn't been such a damn coward and failed to ask the right questions was masterly. In the media of the 60s and 70s, Albert Speer fulfilled a need to believe how fallible mankind was, that it could find itself so close to evil and yet fail to notice how close. If this offered to a generation of Germans an explanation, of sorts, for how almost an entire people got sucked into the darkness of National Socialism, it also helped elsewhere in Europe, and in the USA, to drive a Liberal narrative in which people desperately wanted to forgive this atrocity and move on from it.

Heinrich Breloer's forensic film is having none of it. Along the way it methodically sets out hard archive evidence that not only was Speer aware of the Final Solution, he himself helped to trigger it when he discovered that in order to build Hitler's tumescent new buildings, acres of Berlin had to be demolished. This left a housing defecit which was solved, at Speer's suggestion, by evacuating entire areas, evicting, yes, 50,000 Jews to reallocate housing to Gentiles. And what to do with these evacuated Jews? Speer had an answer for this as well. Send them to work camps where they could quarry the rocks of massive slabs of ideologically pure red and white granite required for the New Utopia. If thousands of them died in the process of smashing rocks without sustenance, sleep or even adequate barracks to live in well, you know what they say about omelettes and breaking eggs.

The strange truth about Speer is that he was Richard Wagner to Hitler's Ludwig II. Hitler was clearly besotted with him, considered him an architectural genius and put limitless resources at the disposal of his boy wonder, in return for which Speer offered a tacit loyalty and complicity. In time, Speer became his only true confidante but, as far back as the Nuremberg trials, was already constructing the post-war reinvention of himself as the kindly, somewhat regretful media figure who went on to sell millions of copies of his so-called "memoirs" and "diaries" and died a rich man, declaring that, given the chance, he would not have changed a thing.

Superb.

[Low D]

Speer and Hitler ["Speer und Er"] (Heinrich Breloer, 2005)

This sounds great. I might pair it up with Architecture of Doom for my son to watch (as he's been watching some rather shallow stuff on the topic).

Me, i watched The Boys and the Girl From County Clare the other night. What a fun, lovely, film. Even if parts of the story are quite hackneyed, they're acted with real enough passion to make it all believeable. And the soundtrack was directed by that Fiacha Trench guy, and features a bit of Scott Gorham and Paddy Glackin, amongst others. Great family film.

[old barney greyheron]

Will be watching a dreadful-looking thing, under duress and hopefully under the influence, called 'The Devil's Rejects'