The normalisation of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is a sign of the moral vacuum we are gradually approaching.
love “becomes all about choice — choosing to love someone, choosing not to cheat on them. It becomes this long series of choices, and that’s actually where your mettle as a person is tested.
Our capacity for fantasy — for indulging that nagging sense that as good as we’ve got it, there could be something better, some person or place that could transform us — might be humankind’s greatest burden.
loopermovie:

Our In-Theater Commentary Track is up!
I recorded a commentary track to be downloaded, put on an ipod and listened to in the theater as you’re watching Looper.  This is an odd thing I tried with Bloom, and have gotten a few requests for it again, so here it is.  It is totally different from the commentary track that will be on the Blu/DVD, a bit more technical and detailed.  Needless to say, this is NOT to be listened to on a first viewing, or before you’ve seen the film.  Also, please work it so that a glowing screening is never out of your pocket during the movie.
Listen to the introduction before heading to the theater, it has instructions.  And lemme know how it works.
Go HERE to download the in-theater commentary track for Looper! (the “download” button is the little down arrow on the toolbar)

loopermovie:

Our In-Theater Commentary Track is up!

I recorded a commentary track to be downloaded, put on an ipod and listened to in the theater as you’re watching Looper.  This is an odd thing I tried with Bloom, and have gotten a few requests for it again, so here it is.  It is totally different from the commentary track that will be on the Blu/DVD, a bit more technical and detailed.  Needless to say, this is NOT to be listened to on a first viewing, or before you’ve seen the film.  Also, please work it so that a glowing screening is never out of your pocket during the movie.

Listen to the introduction before heading to the theater, it has instructions.  And lemme know how it works.

Go HERE to download the in-theater commentary track for Looper! (the “download” button is the little down arrow on the toolbar)

Crime films, Dominik said, were “the most honest films about America” because in them it was “perfectly acceptable for all the characters to be motivated by money”. They “portray Americans as I experience a lot of them, particularly in Hollywood”, he said.
Let’s take that in for a minute: the studio whose most iconic heroes include a toy cowboy, a rat, a fish, a boy scout, and a lonely trash compactor (all male-identified, of course), couldn’t figure out how to tell a story about a human girl without making her a princess. That’s the problem in a nutshell: if the sparkling minds at Pixar can’t imagine their way out of the princess paradigm, how can we expect girls to?
Anytime a director casts an actor like Kevin Costner to play a prosecutor delivering a heartfelt summation, we must keep things in perspective and remember it is only a dramatization of events that we’re watching. Every good feature requires a hero and a villain and screen-writers usually take their liberties in providing them.
thebestandworstofeverything:

What is the best movie scene to experience in real life?

thebestandworstofeverything:

What is the best movie scene to experience in real life?

Blur ended up with 26 moments approved by Fincher, then composed them into 252 shots of 24 frames or fewer. Each piece was created electronically using 3ds Max, RealFlow (for the oily goo), Softimage and other software, as well as 3-D scans of principal actors Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig (to get their likenesses right).

(Source: observando)

gingerhaze:

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows Summary.
She’s secretly into it.

gingerhaze:

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows Summary.

She’s secretly into it.

God knows I’m Team Buffy, not Team Bella, and I prefer my vampires evil, but it seems to me that Twilight attracts a lot more vitriol than any other nonsense aimed at the young male demographic. I gave up looking for sample quotes, because the same adjectives came up. Ludicrous, ridiculous and risible are favourites, along with cheesy and sappy, but words such as these could equally be applied to, say, Green Lantern, Cowboys and Aliens, or Conan the Barbarian. Except they aren’t; reviews of such boy-tosh may be predominantly negative, but the tone is not so much derisive as regretful at opportunities wasted. No matter that movies aimed at boys feature superpowers or super-robots or saving the world with super-ninja skills. Those sorts of fantasies are permissible, almost cool, even when the films peddling them are awful.
The affinities of “Marilyn and Maggie”, it turns out, are as profound as their differences. They were both defined by emerging neo-Victorian ideas about women; and they both tactically deployed traditional ideas of femininity, so often used against them, to reach the pinnacle of male-dominated professions.
Not that Sparks has any reason to be worried. His films aren’t meant to be reviewed (which would explain the 16% that Rottentomatoes handed The Last Song) or even seen at a cinema. No, Nicholas Sparks films traditionally fare best on DVD where, without wanting to stereotype anyone too harshly, they can be watched by all sorts of just-dumped women in pyjamas, on their sofa, surrounded by empty ice cream tubs and hundreds of soggy tissues, without fear of blowing snot across whoever’s sitting in the row immediately in front of them.

Viruses are invisible, pitiless, ferocious, proven mass killers. The 1918 flu epidemic dispatched over 20 million people. Another such epidemic is expected before too long, and because communications have improved so much, it could be much more devastating. Yet Contagion is far less likely to be eliciting shrieks at your local multiplex than Paranormal Activity 3.

On the face of it, this constitutes a malfunction of humanity’s self-defence mechanism. Of course, when our instincts were taking shape we weren’t to know we should be worrying about pathogens rather than sabre-toothed tigers. Yet we’ve learned to frighten ourselves with plenty of new bugaboos, from terrorists to paedophiles, which don’t begin to match the threat we face from flu.