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Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU from "The Sorbonne" on IMDb:

Damnation in Montana, 18 July 2009
10/10

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

A masterpiece in its genre, post Indian war frontier films, Montana in that case. A masterpiece too because of the three sons entirely entrusted to their ex-officer of a father because of the running away of the mother who could not stand the cold winters of Montana and was afraid of grizzly bears, that loving friendly species of furry animals more or less the cousins of our home-friendly teddy bears. Then the eldest son goes to the city of his mother to study and comes back with a fiancée, but it is 1914 and the three sons can only follow their patriotic call to go and fight in Europe on the English side. The father is furious but nothing can stop that call of the wild. The picture of the first world war is dramatic when you see these British soldiers running to the German lines with simple rifles and no helmets when the Germans have machine guns, helmets of course and gas masks against their poisonous gases. The eldest son is killed and the youngest son does what an old Indian rite tells him to do. He gets the heart of his brother out and eventually sends it back to his father for it to be buried in due place. Then he gets his Indian colors on his face and goes out to kill and scalp two German machine-gun operators, two of your teeth for one of my teeth. The middle son, wounded on one leg, is sent home and the younger son eventually comes back home. The real stake of the film then is Susanna, the fiancée of the elder son who was killed in the war. She was in love before the departure of the three brothers and still is after the war with the younger son, a wild but thrilling personality. A competition between the two surviving brothers starts then. Susanna chooses the younger one, but his wild side, what the Indian story teller calls his bear side, calls him away and he yields to that call and leaves the ranch for several years in order to discover the world and conquer his thirst, hunger and even his ravenous greed for the unknown and the savage. When he comes back Susanna has gone to the middle brother who has become a congressman in the meantime. The younger son, Justin, then accepts the situation and marries the daughter of the main family working on the ranch, from an Indian mother and an American father. He will get two children from her but he will try to compete with the prohibition traffickers who have the full support of the local sheriff. That will lead to a drama, the death of his wife, then his vengeance as soon as he is out of prison, on bail I suspect, and the attempt of the main moonshiner with the help of the sheriff to come and kill that rebellious man. And there the plot thickens and from dramatic we jump to tragic. And the main character of the story all get the ends they deserve, the middle brother, the younger brother, Susannah, the father and all the others, including the local moonshiner and his police friends. The end of the younger brother, in 1963 mind you, is absolutely brilliant. Add to that very strong story the beautiful and breathtaking landscape and mountains of Montana and you really enjoy every single scene. And after it all, when the last die is thrown on the marble of the tombstone you keep in mind the strong images about the first world war and the no less strong discourse of the father against all kinds of war that are declared bad by principle. Are they really bad by principle? Is there nothing to save a war now and then? For this film certainly not, and that is the fault of the politicians who are ready to do any kind of profitable maneuver to keep their juicy positions in government.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

Amazon.com customer review of "You can't take It With You":

You Can't Take It with You (Remastered): I thought that as this was a remastered edition that it would be IN COLOR! It isn't. That's disappointin because it didn't clearly indicate on the site that it wasn't in color, but in fact, black and white.We wanted a colorized version. Look at the picture on the site- COLOR!

ehrrr....."remaster" doesn't translate to "tacky revisionism"....

Not everyone is a fan of Paul Rudd on the Facebook Paul Rudd Fan Page

Paul Rudd would make a great shoe scanner, I hear that's what most failed negligibility Retarder shoe shiners move on to do.

I'm glad Samer Hassan likes his own posts.

I usually like to peruse the tribute.ca site (I guess you could call it a Canadian version of Fandango--maybe) and there's always good stuff there, but it's usually just too easy and I don't post what I find. But I got a kick out of this one for District 9:

great but not good

Talk about taking the Anwar Sadat thing in "I Love You, Man" way too seriously!

So Dawn Tapley at Cinematical goes into a long diatribe about why she has never or never will see Schindler's List and then goes on to point out all the flaws of the film (that she's never seen). This is sort of breathtaking in its stupidity.

Wow. Truly, truly bizarre.

My new favorite poster from IMDB is screenwriter99. Some choice excerpts...
On Apocalypse Now

screenwriter99 wrote:Maybe I should have waited another 30 years. I felt like the movie went know where. Azzhole gets mission to go kill Rogue Colonel. Azzhole goes and kills Rogue Colonel. The End! Wow, that's it?

On A Clockword Orange

screenwriter99 wrote:Any film that needs more than one viewing just to "get it" as opposed to "reliving the enjoyment" is a film that is not worth more than one viewing. This is clearly one of those films. A Clockwork Orange goes nowhere and I'm tired of people confusing Stanley Kubrick's odd style of filming with great filmmaking. He ain't all that.

On Defiance

Thank God. For a second I was really beginning to think Tinseltown had forgotten how to make great movies. Loved this one. Perfect in every regard. I wish I had more hands so I could give this one ten thumbs up.

And the best for last

screenwriter99 wrote:Some people are just trolls. It's their way of engaging with people because people don't engage them in real life.

I would try and find more but his posting history is flooding with dozens and dozens of posts on the Michael Jackson board, so I gave up trying to look for other responses about actual movies.

Harry @ Aint It Cool
RE: Playtime

Bored the hell out of me. If you choose to watch this – you have to do nothing but watch this. It is a comedy of observations… in otherwords you have to watch to find the jokes, because they’re not really verbally delivered. Tati is an acquired taste that I haven’t quite acquired. The look of this film is gorgeous. The production design, shot selection – all of it is quite compelling to look at. I just don’t know if I’ll watch it again. The visual detail is lovely. It is a film that I respect, but don’t really appreciate. To each their own.

I hate it when those damn movies make me have to watch them instead of the other shit I'm trying to do! ](*,)

Zumpano wrote:Harry @ Aint It Cool
RE: Playtime

Please tell me it was actually Harry Knowles who wrote that.

Yup, in his weekly DVD release column.

Tati didn't include enough monsters farting on exploding bikini babes to pique AICN's interest-- a well-established deficiency in his work

Seriously? You guys are shocked?

Hey, I will admit that the first time I watched Playtime it gave me a massive headache. My head was literally throbbing after trying to keep up with the restaurant sequence. So I can understand Tati's work being a taste that not all would care to acquire. But boring? How can any film with that much visual overload possibly be boring?

Here's right-wing activist, Debbie Schlussel's review of Inglorious Basterds.

Although she holds that it is the best film of the year, she does have a few caveats:

It’s that well done. My only regrets are 1) that it’s not a true story; and 2) that no-one in Hollywood has the guts to do an “Inglorious Basterds” with Americans fighting our current enemy: Muslim invaders who’ve also replaced their friends, the Nazis, as the thugs upon Europe. If only Abu Steven Spielberg had had the guts to do “Munich” like this.

and

Yes, this movie is somewhat bloody and graphic (a couple of Nazi scalpings are shown as is a scene of “The Jewish Bear” (Eli Roth) wailing on a Nazi’s head with a baseball bat–though that’s only briefly shown). But the violence is for a reason: it’s good against evil. And it’s thoroughly satisfying. I wish they showed even more. I don’t apologize for cheering on the killing of Nazis. They were inhuman. And the treatment they got in this movie is the same way we should treat all of our enemies, but simply don’t have the guts to do so. It’s fun to see the SS and Gestapo members get well-merited permanent reminders of their days wearing the swastika.

Wow

Debbie Schlussel wrote:They were inhuman. And the treatment they got...is the same way we should treat all of our enemies, but simply don’t have the guts to do so.

I'm pretty sure this is the exact sentiment that allowed the holocaust to happen.

Oops, I almost forgot to mention the nuttiest part of her piece. How did she rate the film? Four out of four Reagans.

From now on I shall use this system for all of my ratings.

I think I might have found my favourite use of a quote on a DVD cover:

"Annoyingly better"? I'm actually confused as to whether that is a rave or not.

He's likely upset that the adaptation took the original material in directions he wished he'd have thought of when writing - so it's a recommendation but he's annoyed that it surpassed his work!

It's the type of quote I'd like to fantasise about seeing from Stephen King on the cover for Kubrick's Shining!

bamwc2 wrote:From now on I shall use this system for all of my ratings.

J.G. Ballard would have approved

I'm not too surprised at her review. This is, I remind you, a person who belongs to the wing of politics that contains Birthers and Deathers.

oldsheperd wrote:This is, I remind you, a person who belongs to the wing of politics that contains ...Deathers.

So the Dems want to kill your grandma, big whoop! We did it all the time in Canada thanks to our pinko health care system. I don't really understand what the big deal is.

EDIT: Sorry. I didn't mean to call it a "pinko" health care system, I meant "Nazi" health care system.

This has to be fake (on The Shining):

And Shelley Duvall. What can I say about her? She looks like Olive Oyl from the POPEYE cartoons. How ridiculous!

Good ole Flixster. Excerpt taken from Ed Boxler's Inglourious Basterds review.

Tarrantino is a modern day Shakespeare. He borrows from all the filmmakers he loved growing up.