Sicario.

Dude. Damn. Dark. /10

(DDD, btw)

Stuff not directly related to the movie (which I loved).

1) Getting into an unmarked Uber (no sticker) after leaving the theater kind of freaked me out.
2) I hear Juarez is a lot better now. It's peak of violence was 2010. They're even trying to attract tourists.
3) Aren't those SUVs in the Mexican raid armored? Why didn't they have some kind of bulletproof/ballistic glass?

I like that the film didn't try to hide anything from you. Everything that could be considered a twist was hinted at. The revenge angle was hinted at. The fact that he's connected to Colombian cartels was frequently told. The Mexican cop being involved in the cartel was pretty obvious. The FBI agent "doing it by the book." I don't think I saw anything in the film where the groundwork wasn't previously laid. Oh, and it's beautifully shot. Every frame feels like it has a purpose (this may be an exaggeration). The Mexican border sign that says No More Weapons (which is being taken down, btw) is real, but it was also clearly intentionally shown. I'm not sure if there is significance to repeatedly showing the signs on the mountain that say "City Juarez, the Bible is the truth" and "50 years of his apostolate S.J.F." other than as establishing shots, but that didn't stop me from reading into it (especially the Bible one).

It just clicked who the Sicario is.

Arabian Nights, vol. 1: The Restless One - 9/10 (Miguel Gomes, 2014)

Arabian Nights, vol. 2: The Desolate One - 9/10 (Miguel Gomes, 2015)

Arabian Nights, vol. 3: The Enchanted One - 8/10 (Miguel Gomes, 2015)

Stop Making Sense - 9/10 (Jonathan Demme, 1984)

Listen Up Philip - 9/10 (Alex Ross Perry, 2014)

Son of Saul - 8.5/10 (Lazlo Nemes, 2015)

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - 8/10 (Kerry Conran, 2004)

Le roman de Renard - 8/10 (Irene & Wladyslaw Starewicz, 1930)

The Assassin - 8/10 (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)

Sicario - 8/10 (Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

Show Me a Hero - 7.5/10 (Paul Haggis, 2015)

Jeremiah Johnson - 7.5/10 (Sydney Pollack, 1972)

Labyrinth - 7.5/10 (Jim Henson, 1986)

D'Ardennen - 7.5/10 (Robin Pront, 2015)

Fehérlófia - 7.5/10 (Marcell Jankovics, 1981)

The Forbidden Room - 7.5/10 (Guy Maddin, 2015)

The Duke of Burgundy - 7.5/10 (Peter Strickland, 2014)

The Babadook - 7.5/10 (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

Fresh - 7/10 (Boaz Yakin, 1994)

Steve + Sky - 7/10 (Felix Van Groeningen, 2004)

Duck You Sucker - 7/10 (Sergio Leone, 1971)

Spectre - 7/10 (Sam Mendes, 2015)

The Dark Crystal - 7/10 (Jim Henson, 1982)

Bestiaire - 7/10 (Dennis Côté, 2012)

Ishtar - 6.5/10 (Elaine May, 1987)

Pumpkinhead - 6.5/10 (Stan Winston, 1988)

Purgatory - 6.5/10 (Uli Edel, 1999)

Turbo Kid - 6/10 (Anouk Whissel, 2015)

Barfly - 6/10 (Barbet Schroeder, 1987)

Under Siege - 6/10 (Andrew Davis, 1992)

Regression - 6/10 (Alejandro Amenabar, 2015)

The Uninvited - 6/10 (Lewis Allen, 1944)

Gran Torino - 6/10 (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

Youth - 5.5/10 (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

From Russia With Love - 5/10 (Terence Young, 1963)

Iron Sky - 5/10 (Timo Vuorensola, 2012)

Szamanka - 4.5/10 (Andrzej Zulawski, 1996)

The Green Inferno - 4/10 (Eli Roth, 2013)

Willow - 4/10 (Ron Howard, 1988)

Highlander - 3/10 (Russel Mulcahy, 1986)

Oh fuck you.

Because I prefer Labyrinth over The Dark Crystal?

Ladies please, they're both ludicrous crap that people only like for nostalgia reasons.

What are you talking about? Both first time viewings for me and I thought they were both excellent.

Says the LOTR fan.

Fantasy films were great in the 80s, now they're just shit, it has nothing to do with nostalgia, nope I just prefer my fantasy films to be like fairy tales rather than bad fanfiction.

So 7/10 is excellent and 6/10 is pretty bad, fucking seriously?

I dunno, I think Pan's Labyrinth did a similar thing to Dark Crystal and Labyrinth much, much better. I'm with you on 80s fantasy though, they watch like contemporary fantasy novels read, which is something sorely missing from modern cinema with a few exceptions.

Pan's Labyrinth is nothing like those films, Dark Crystal and Labyrinth are just humble fairy tales, Pan's Labyrinth is a pretentious piece of shit war drama masquerading as a fairy tale... great movie though, one of the best of the decade.

Also I find the whole "nostalgia" dismissal to be such a fucking copout, maybe some people legitimately still like the things they grew up with because it has fucking held up for them? Is that so hard to grasp? Maybe sometimes the things we loved as a kid we loved for a fucking reason.

I've seen The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth like a trillion times and I still think they're great, they're films I look forward to watching again many more times in the future, not just because they're nostalgiac movies for me, which they certainly are, but because I still enjoy and admire the fuck out of them. Meanwhile if I never have to see the LOTR trilogy again I'd be perfectly fucking content.

Plain and simply I think movie genres like fantasy, sci fi, horror and action were far and away superior before the digital age, every now and then there's a Del Toro, but it's mostly Nolans and Snyders and Abramss and Whedons, really grim times.

do you have any idea how much money it takes to make one of those movies? do you seriously think they're going to give it to a director that isn't a safe bet in terms of recouping their investment? the hobbit cost $735 million, ffs.

LOTR changed everything. you can't not make a really expensive fantasy film these days. that's why they stopped taking chances with fantasy movies and why they can take chances with GoT.

Why does a fantasy film HAVE to be made on a huge budget? Look at how many great sci fi films have been made on a low budget, and pretty recently, why should fantasy be any different? I don't think making low budget fantasy films would be that hard to do, and you could take more risks.

Yeah any fantasy film that tries to be LOTR is gonna be expensive, and if you haven't figured it out I don't want any more fucking fantasy films that try to be LOTR, I'm so fucking sick of LOTR's stranglehold on the genre, I want to see more fantasy films that tell smaller scale stories revolving around just a few characters instead of fucking hundreds of them, the way fantasy films were done before LOTR, not saying a big ensemble cast is always a bad thing, but Peter Jackson is not fucking Robert Altman.

My biggest issue with the LOTR trilogy is that in spite of how ungodly long it is, I still feel like I didn't get to know most of the characters because there was so much plot and the films were so much more wrapped up in tying it all together than just letting the audience breath and just hang out with the characters, which is the reason I liked the first Hobbit a lot more because it did just that.

I'm being completely serious when I say I was much more immersed in the world of Bakshi's film than Jackson's trilogy, sure that film left a lot out of the book (good, film adaptations SHOULD fucking do that) and had many unresolved loose ends, but by being a film that focused on just a few characters, simplifying the story and cutting out all the bullshit exposition and just letting the visuals do all the talking it accomplished a lot more in the end, that's 2 hours vs fucking 11 hours, bigger isn't always better.

producers (i.e. the people who pay for these movies) don't necessarily want LOTR in terms of story, but they sure as fuck want the box office return. that's why they're expensive these days. to make an enormous amount of money you have to spend an enormous amount of money.

you keep looking at this from the perspective of artistic merit when it's the business side of things that's preventing the kinds of fantasy films you're talking about from being made. people (and by that i mean studio executives) simply didn't really care about fantasy movies until lord of the rings because they never made that much money (aside from star wars, but we're not talking about that particular kind of fantasy here). that's why they used to be able to make them relatively cheaply and get a nice return.

Is The Neverending Story worth rewatching or is it only watchable for nostalgia purposes?

it definitely doesn't hold up as well but it's not a bad film objectively. nothing at all wrong with some nostalgia though.