What Kind of Movies Do You Like?

What about musicals Ally? But I know what you mean about manipulative scores.

I too was annoyed by Pi's maths - being a maths and philosophy boy this was right up my street. Oddly with a bit of jiggery pokery (and a slightly better grasp of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem) you could have happily used the premise ass a proof of the non-existance of God hidden by Hasidic Jews for a long time. Odd flick really, really unsatisfied by it at the time but big fan of trepanning movies so...

Requiem For A Dream however is a masterpiece. So Aronfsky = good (even better he equals interesting). Annoyance with Coens may possibly stem from annoyance with ethos. The Coens do not appear to be trying to say anything with their movies but entertain. Yet we smart folks are wary of things which just entertain. That's my theory anyway - I like the Coens and find dislike of them similar to the dislike people have for St Ettienne or The Auteurs (ie pop which is supposedly trying to be too clever).

As I may have said elsewhere, ages ago, if the Coen Bros were a pop group they would be the abysmal WEEN - ie: 'wacky' exercises in genre coupled with general snootiness towards folk with 'crazy' regional accents. Gah!

I like films which feature: a) people dressed up like bears (regle de jeu) b) dinosaur skeletons (bringing up baby, one of our dinosaurs is missing) c) french people singing (les parapluie de cherbourg, une femme est une femme) d) philip seymour hoffman

I must admit, I watched Pi, thought it was okay, then watched it with a director's commentary and thought it was outstanding. Maybe I needed to be helped through it a bit, I don't know.

I really like Coen Brothers movies though. Especially The Big Lebowski. It's just so, well, silly. Terry Gilliam is great for similar reasons, and Brazil is one of my favourite films of all time. Worried that I relate so strongly to the lead in that film. Yikes.

Big Lebowski has Julianne Moore in it so is rubbish (since today appears to be my day of Dissing Ms Moore). Gilliam is a perfect example of flawed movies being more interesting than good ones.

I see what you mean about Ween Stevie. Does that make Barton Fink their Push Th'Little Daisies? (ie A film based on just one joke).

I don't like musicals, besides Naked Boys Singing. I decided that for good this weekend.

I like movies about lonely people in unusual situations ("The Last Emperor", "Harold and Maude"), thwarted dreams ("Angel at My Table", "Taste of Honey", "House of Mirth"), fighting oppressive societies with quiet dignity ("Before Night Falls"), subtly dysfunctional families ("You Can Count on Me"). Movies about misfits, basically. How sad, I know. It helps if they're visually stunning, like "Last Emperor" or "Before Night Falls". That scene in BNF where they're driving through Manhattan in a convertible, laughing and staring up at the skyscrapers through the falling snow-so beautiful. It reminded me of Television's "Venus".

Just saw AI, and it had its ups and downs but Spielberg *really* blew it with the tacky tacked-on coda w/ extraterrestials. Otherwise, it would have ended on the perfect note --sad, lonely and beautiful, yahoo.

I also like campy/goofy movies that get that smart aleck gay sensibility right, like early John Waters and Paul Morrissey. Or Bruce La Bruce. And recently, I saw "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (the movie) at a preview. Loved it!

And I agree with whoever said up there that what they want from movies is better scripts. Not more dialogue/less dialogue or more plot-just better scripts. And more male frontal nudity.

Kind of agree with Tarden about the Coen Bros., especially with regard to the hick accents. But I did like "The Great Lebowski", maybe it was the charm of the title character. Or Jeff Bridges. And Ween have some really gorgeous, lush pop songs that are very far removed from their wacky side. Still don't think I could ever spend money on a record of theirs, though.

And "The Wizard of Oz" has everything you'd ever need from a movie, except cute guys.

I never quite liked Pi, though a girl with a broken arm bought me popcorn and fed it to me throughout. To me Pi was an overlong proof for the equation "genius = doomed to pain", a formula that they didn't manage to interest me in. The guy wasn't Icarus, he wasn't even necessarily a genius; he was a paranoid schizophrenic whose "friends" mysteriously never noticed that he desperately needed help.

Re: Cohens: all their movies are about other movies, or about the expectations that a lifetime of movie-watching can put you in. This works really well for me when their movies are set in the present - a very self-reflexive, hyper-commentated time. When set in the past, their heightened ironic style jars - Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother. Never complained too much about the regional accents until this last one which hit way too close to home - and nobody even came close to getting the accent right! We expect so little of our actors these days!

More movies ought to help you notice details in your life, or in others' lives, that you may have missed. Yi Yi by Edward Yang does this very effectively. When I walked out of it, I noticed other people entirely differently for a few minutes, like there were invisible threads between us; no one spoke, feeling gauche, no one wanted to break the spell. So it's no surprise my fave directors are John Cassavetes, Terence Malick, Bunuel, etc. Is my pop cred finished?

Am very interested in Mark S.'s take on Pokemon 3 though the conversation will be rather one-sided since he's probably only one who's seen it. I saw A.I. yesterday and am armed and ready for total critical destruction of all Spielbergian gloss but I will stand down since y'all prolly haven't seen it yet.

The math stuff in Pi was horribly wrong, but I tried very hard to ignore it - the focus was him being fucked anyway, the math didn't actually matter.

As for Coens = Ween - I am appalled. Ween can suck it. The Coens make movies to entertain. Ween make records so they can afford to buy more glue to sniff. Plus: despite all the other stuff, I think the heart of Big Lebowski is the relationship between the Dude, Walter, and Donnie, and that is superbly done.

Ally - so if you hated gangster movies and then liked Goodfellas, isn't that a complaint of yours being answered well? What was the complaint? Where did Goodfellas succeed where the others failed? Certainly not in subject matter - same movie Scorcese's been making for years - soundtrack was good blah blah - so what was it?

I like films that keep me interested in what's going to happen next. But not in a pointlessly convoluted murder mystery whodunnit way (like when smug gits say afterwards "You must have seen that coming a mile off!" and I'm like "No, sorry. I was too busy watching the fucking film"). Thinking about films is a total dud, I mean, aren't writers/directors/producers paid to do the thinking for you? Action sequences/Eye Candy/Stunts/Technical Greatness have very little appeal to me. Sorry. Short term brainless cliffhangers for me: Is he gonna die? Will she ever find her long lost third cousin? Will he escape from impossibly complex fortress/lair/sinking ship/alien kidnappers? Will she get her norks out? Trashy movies like the Channel 5/Living ones Kate mentioned fit me perfectly (making up a more interesting story than what really happens makes you fell so gosh-darned clever), and an equally rich seam can be found on BBC1, midnight weekdays.

I have no recognition of what good and bad acting is, with the obvious exception of the impossibly bad Ashley off of Eastenders.

Films I seem to watch every time they're on even though I know they're crap and pointless and excruciating and I've seen them a million times before: Short Circuit 1+2, Back to the future 1+2+3, Honey I Blew up the Kids 1+2, Flight of the Navigator. And so on.

I'm a sucker for war films, but only decent ones, none of that Kelly's Heroes rubbish.

Tracer: Simple fact is that it was well made and not romaticised. It felt "honest" to me, whereas the Godfather and its ilk are nothing more than fairy tales. Convoluted ones at that.

Well then there you go... Although I liked the Godfather. But I'm a sucker for all that "old country" stuff, Pacino in paisano gear roaming the Sicilian countryside. And there are great moments in that film, small glances that destroy. In general I agree abt stylized romanticism tho -- not only in gangster movies but in any period piece where each shoelace looks like it cost more than my house. If you went by the movies you saw you'd think that everything in the past was very expensive and well-groomed.

'Godfather I' was a fairy tale (no less good for that), 'Godfather 2' was an ice-cold dissection of the American century blah blah, but 'Goodfellas' was the most wildly overrated film ever - sure, loads of fantastic bits, but didn't the story arc just kind of...fizzle...("Johny was in prison upstate, Pauly was somewhere else...I don't know..." - I know this was supposed to illustrate how 'normal' being inside'n'outside was to them, but who wants to see a 'normal' working day on screen? Especially since it immediately afterwards into the apocalyptic cocaine paranoia - I mean, come on! Helicopters? This is out of a 60's Richard Rush film, with Bruce Dern! Marty exorcising his lost weekend with Robbie Robertson, why not use "Stage Fright" instead of "Monkey Man") Anyway, for the supposedly quotidien counterblast to 'Godfather', he did a FAR better job with 'Mean Streets', earlier on

Hey, I like Ween! I can see what people mean though. I think the difference is, when Ween is on you can program the good tracks and do the dishes, whereas with film you have to sit in one position and watch the brothers jerk off for nearly two hours.
If Coen bros=Ween, then does David Fincher=Korn?

i rather like trite films. but archly stylistic piles of toss are just as good...

Trying to think of an archly stylistic pile of toss which is also trite : I know Absolute Beginners. You'd love that Gareth.

um, hated absolute beginners, sorry pete...