Movie Recommendations

I enjoyed Crimson Peak purely on a visual level. It was a movie that was made because the artist wanted to make it, rather than for marketability. There is no real place for a gothic romance in today's culture, so it was a risk made for personal expression. For that reason I can't view it as the death of cinema. It's too atypical of a Hollywood movie compared to something like Rogue One. I despised Rogue One.

Today I watched Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, which I thought was incredible.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

The visual level was often spoiled by caked on cgi. Even the dog. I don't think the film was that personal, it sometimes seemed like it was pandering to Hiddleston fans and there will always be popular appeal for that sort of gothic romance.

[Spiral]

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Adam Gilmour

The visual level was often spoiled by caked on cgi. Even the dog. I don't think the film was that personal, it sometimes seemed like it was pandering to Hiddleston fans and there will always be popular appeal for that sort of gothic romance.

A lot of what people think is CGI in that movie isn't (like most of the ghosts), it's a shame how the industry brainwashed most of us to perceive it that way.

I absoltely love that movie. What an ending too, even if I wanted the house to fall like the Usher House

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

You can still tell there's way too much cgi. There was things I couldn't quite tell because a lot of real things in some films get cgi painted on.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I don't mind Hiddleston but I wish Cumberbatch had stayed in the role. Wasikowska replaced Emma Stone, who probably would have been fine but a little harder for me to picture.

[Hanswurst]

I would like to recommend a movie that doesn't get the attention it deserves: "Juliet of the Spirits", Federico Fellini's first colour movie from 1965.
In fact, it's my favourite movie ever. Everything about it is pure perfection, from the great score by Nino Rota, to the acting, the plot and especially the incredibly beautiful dreamlike atmosphere. Highly recommended!

Juliet of the Spirits Trailer - YouTube

[qcrisp]

It's interesting to hear people's views of Crimson Peak here. I wasn't attempting to be contrarian. It was really one of the very few films I almost walked out on (I've only ever walked out on one or two).

[qcrisp]

Okay, from some e-mails I sent just after watching Crimson Peak, edited and pasted below:

YouTube

Quoth Carmelo Bene: “In the cinema there’s the addition of dubbing. Dubbing is the umpteenth copy that becomes this sort of tiny masturbation of the set on the set of the set illuminated with great attention. The entire opus of Fellini, for instance, is nothing more than a disastrous self-gratification of the set. He’s neither a great acrobat nor a firefighter. Alas, he’s a film-maker. You can’t make literature out of literature. You can’t make music out of music. You can’t make films out of films. Just as you can’t live off life. You need to look elsewhere. But where is this ‘elsewhere’ in the movies? … There’s this intellectualism incapable of examining the problem, the split between written and oral. At least for the images, isn’t there an image? There’s a backside up there? That would be rather international. It doesn’t need any dubbing. But they even dub backsides! Sure! They’d even be capable of dubbing a backside!”

...Crimson Peak made me think that, after all, [Carmelo Bene] was only talking sense. Crimson Peak was a film that, indeed, made me think, “Sure! They’d even be capable of dubbing a backside!”

Did films used to be this bad? I find it hard to believe that they ever were, especially with a ‘name’ director like del Toro, and A-list actors. I mean, I realise that these things are often more a guarantee of lowest common denominator than anything, but even so, I don’t believe that professional films have ever been quite as bad as this before.

From the opening minutes, with all the cut-and-paste Gothic elements, and the vomit-worthy taffeta costumes and the school-play-ish voice-over—“Ghosts are real: this much I know”—I knew the whole thing was going to be a piece of self-aggrandising ####. It actually strikes me as criminal that this kind of film is being made. I am sure that it is lowering the IQ of whole swathes of the population. As I watched, I began to look out for any detail or moment that was in good faith, or that had any substance behind it—there were none.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Bene is a very interesting director but I don't quite understand what he's saying.

The normalization of cgi is a pet hate of mine and the film industry is really screwed up right now but I don't think films are much worse.

I've been watching a lot of 50s/60s Japanese horror films, Hong Kong action, Hammer and Val Lewton box sets. I think the photography in these films were generally much better but there's so much stupid sh!t in these films that most people are happy to overlook. Things that don't make sense as if the filmmakers didn't care that much.

Many of the above mentioned films, 60s-80s Italian horror, Scarlet Empress, The Grand Silence (these I like) Thing From Another World, Daughters Of Darkness (these two a lot less so) have problems people would never accept from a new film and rightfully so. A lot of the scripts, acting and basic logic is appalling.

Yet I'd rather watch most of these old films because they generally look better. Of course we still have great looking films coming out like Evolution and Duke Of Burgundy.

Crimson Peak is no worse than the films it's inspired by, apart from the cgi of course.

[ToALonelyPeace]

I watched Shudder yesterday, the most hyped Asian horror--second only to A Tale of Two Sisters- and it was a big disappointment. The plot was formulaic and some scenes were there just to check off a Asian horror list of Hair-Growing, Car Crash, Home Visit, Hospital Chase, and Suicide scares. I still have to give it points for using photography to narrate the story, I haven't seen it used before.

Second film I watched, Cache , was much better. As expected from Haneke, he never fails to cauterize my soul with his peculiar brutality. Though the film wasn't provocative as Funny Games or disturbing as The White Ribbon, the focus was still on the everyday man's cruelty. A normal person walking on the streets, a wrong long forgotten, insignificant people to you...all hide an irreparable tragedy.