Recently Watched Films

Long overdue second watch and reevaluation. Now that the book is all but forgotten in my mind I enjoyed this a hell of a lot more. 

 

 

Antichrist was another disturbing one I did see. Watched it once and promptly sold it on. 

I´ve yet to watch Antichrist, but Triers movies are usually pretty twisted (as is he). I actually dined at the same restaurant as him and his crew maybe 15-20 years ago, and he was swallowing more pills than eating food. He actually used to live not more than a mile from my home. I don´t think he lives there anymore though.

On one hand, it's a decent enough movie that remains fast moving throughout it's 2 hour plus length. On the other, it's also possibly the most over hyped movie I've seen for a long time, which also makes it rather underwhelming. I was really expecting so much more from a movie that currently retains an average of 3.95 on RYM, whose community typically hates everything. For me, this doesn't even come close to being worthy of being in the site's top 1000, let alone #130 best movie of all time. I probably set my expectations too high considered that the site also hyped up the directors' previous movie Good Time and I didn't think that was all that either. This is an improvement, but I wouldn't call it a great movie, only an okay one. 

Sandler's Howard Ratner also might just be the most unlikable protagonist I've ever seen in a movie. I found myself completely unsympathetic to the character (in fact no one in the whole movie comes off well - including the people playing themselves) and that's what really dragged this movie down for me, since the whole thing is basically him just having more and more bad luck (aided by his own bad decisions) and yet I can feel no sympathy for the character or care whether he makes his deal of a lifetime or if he crashes and burns. Unless of course that's the intent of the character, but that makes no sense to me because it's not really a comedy and the alternative is that we're supposed to be laughing at his misfortune and for me the idea of that just makes the movie seem pathetic. 

I did like it more than I didn't, but I definitely have very mixed feelings. It's like how I feel about the game Far Cry 3: a great game with an arsehole for a hero. 

That said, there was never any doubt this one was a keeper. I'm not so sure on some others even on my main shelf (I have a main shelf, plus a load in my desk and another load in the spare room which still total over 900 movies and that's not counting TV boxsets which probably put my collection closer to 1000 even after purging a whole bunch already this week).