FilmVomit

Australia is a strange hell- an orange and green, oversaturated, overexposed, blinding-hot hell filled with demons of all breeds and in all shapes. Or so Nick Cave would have you believe.
The Western is never dead, though many proclaim it to be so. It simply requires re-imagining every so often.

The Proposition

This is Kubrick at his most incredibly overindulgent. Lighting indoor scenes with candles, moving at a pace so deliberate and so very achingly tense as to make each scene almost an exercise in eroticized vision, borrowing lenses from NASA- the entire production is over the top. And the end product is so delicate, so easily disrupted, that a single scene in which the lighting is not exactly perfect is so distracting it takes several scenes to recover from it.
I love this film, absolutely and completely, because it is so overwhelmingly beautiful. That kind of beauty is precisely what is necessary when the brain reaches a certain point of tension.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072684/

The editing and cinematography is astounding, even now, even on a small screen. It kicks me in the gut. The disinterest… the apathy. It isn’t a wandering camera, like in Neorealism, it is a dispassionate camera that is slowly drawn in. A camera that is slowly captured by the story-line, that follows the arc of Owen’s character’s development from pathetic waste to savior. Absolutely brilliant.

Children of Men

I cannot figure out why I like this film so much. It’s pretty, yes. It’s filmed luxuriously and is incredibly well-costumed. The art direction is spectacular and the acting is superb. The editing is quite good, the music and the sound are all exceptional. But it lacks depth. I think. Maybe it only appears to be superficial. I can’t decide. The glossy sheen on it is deliberate, right? I am so confused. Sophia Coppola is either a genius, or a very spoiled girl who gets to play with very expensive toys.
It is the ending, really, that leaves me wondering whether what I just watched was what it seemed. So smart, so abrupt, so very very unexpected. But of course, Sophia knows how to end a film. We know this, from her earlier work. I think she starts from the ending and works back, to be honest. She has an image, something she knows will catch and stick, and builds backwards from it.

Marie Antoinette

I saw this again after having read the book. And all I can say is, the Coen boys have big giant weepy bleeding hearts next to Mr. Cormac McCarthy. It retains its brilliance, even seen small. Breathtaking, heartbreaking, and so filled with narrative perfection it almost makes me forget to breathe. Also, Tommy Lee Jones really ought to be used more appropriately. He is so very perfect in this role.

No Country for Old Men