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Post by Fluffy on Oct 29, 2006 10:57:58 GMT -5
Ok, without meaning to sound too excited... this film singlehandedly restored my faith in American cinema. No, I'm serious. Hart and I went to see it because he's a David Bowie maniac, but it was out-freaking-standing and reminded me a lot of the very best stuff Cocteau ever did.
Have any of you seen it yet? What did you think?
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Post by superstitious13 on Dec 11, 2006 18:12:19 GMT -5
oh my goodness. i absolutely lovvveeedd it. there were these guys that walked out behind us and were like "i totally saw it coming. i knew in the first 20 minutes waht was up. it was dumb" i turned around and gave them a thorough lashing. it was amazing. not to mention christian bale is like my all time favourite....
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Post by Simply Panda on Dec 15, 2006 6:09:40 GMT -5
I really enjoyed this movie... but it was to be expected from Chris Nolan... have you seen Memento? ohhh... Brilliant! Also... the entire thing was just incredibly well acted!
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Post by Sphi on Dec 15, 2006 17:08:39 GMT -5
I loved The Prestige too. Saw it a while back, and I was just really impressed by the presentation of the story and the recurring motifs. Also, was anyone else amused by the Edison-Tesla rivalry? I love how they snuck that in. ;D
Memento is next up on my list.
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Post by Fluffy on Dec 17, 2006 12:28:00 GMT -5
I thought the rivalry was awesome - this is probably the first time in fiction/film that Edison came out looking like a bad guy And ditto on appreciating the recurrent motifs, too. The pairs of people in conflict, the three parts of the trick, the 'fire' (electricity) vs. water, the problem of the bird trick killing the bird, etc....
I haven't seen Memento yet. I'll check that out - thanks, Panda!
Jaedan, doesn't that happen in all the films with twist endings - there's always got to be someone who has to say "oh, I knew it all along" Annoying. I personally find it much cooler to be willing to suspend one's disbelief than to have 'solved the mystery' and be too clever for it, especially when the film is so good that it deserves to be discussed as a piece of art, which makes for a conversation, you know?
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Post by Sphi on Dec 18, 2006 1:29:59 GMT -5
Haha...yeah, after the movie, my sister and I joked that the moral of the story is that Edison is evil.
Oooh, I just watched Memento...absolutely loved that one too. Can we talk about it in here, too? I know the movies are completely different, but there was a sort of style similarity, especially with the way Christopher Nolan pieces together his final twists.
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Post by superstitious13 on Dec 24, 2006 1:49:42 GMT -5
wow with all the talk up about memento i will have to see it.
Yeah i wanted to smack him. i dont see why you would want to figure it out in the first 20 minutes. it makes the rest of the movie boring and i wouldnt be bragging about that...
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Post by Fluffy on Dec 26, 2006 12:46:46 GMT -5
I suppose people do things like that to look intelligent, or to feel intelligent, but personally, I think a person looks and feels more intelligent by making a new observation than by claiming to have gotten a jump on a plot twist. I'm sure you know what I mean.
So! We watched Memento yesterday. I think we should post any spoilers in black - so Jaedan, don't highlight any of the apparently empty spaces
Without spoiling anything though, I can definitely say that we ended up deciding that we were very confused. In a good way, though. Um... no, there's really no way to talk about this without spoiling Here:SPOILERS! : So we're certain that Natalie was just using Leonard to get rid of people, right? And we're fairly sure Teddy was doing the same thing, especially since one of the few lines he appeared to deliver honestly was "You're not a killer, Lenny, that's why you're so good at it." The problem here appears to be that we don't know how these people know Leonard. My preliminary theory is that Teddy is (or was) a cop, that he worked on the assault case and that's how he found out about Leonard's condition, and that Teddy at first tried to help Leonard (for the same reasons that Leonard was fascinated with Sammy), but then realised what kind of power he could have over Leonard and started engineering ways to use Leonard to make money and kill off anyone who got in the way. The Discount Inn clerk is obviously in on the deal - very in - because (I think) the part with the wrong room demonstrates that they've had Leonard staying in different rooms there while employing him to do different illegal things.
So Leonard, based on limited information, makes this decision, right, to convince himself that Teddy is the guy he has to kill. Here's what I love about the film: We can't help feeling that this is ethically wrong - Leonard is deciding to lie to himself, in a way that will end up killing someone - and yet, we can't help feeling that it's necessary, because how else can Leonard break out of the cycle of being used by Teddy? And ultimately... how is what Leonard does, deciding on a course of action and doing what he has to do to carry out that course, different from what all of us do, all the time?
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Post by Sphi on Dec 26, 2006 19:50:43 GMT -5
Spoilers:I agree that Natalie was just using Leonard; as soon as she saw the car and the clothes, she knew he had something to do with her boyfriend's disappearance/death, so she felt no guilt. Teddy, though...I didn't think he was just using Leonard. The way I saw it, Teddy sympathized with Leonard, but he's also gotten a bit jaded after all this business, so yeah, he did start looking for ways to benefit on the side. ...I could very well be wrong, though. It was a complicated movie. I also didn't suspect anything of the motel clerk. He tried to scam Leonard by checking him into more than one room, but was there any other evidence that he had anything to do with the larger "conspiracy"?
But I definitely loved that last thing you mentioned, En, about how he sets his mind of one course of action and carries it out. I've always loved the concept of memory, and how Leonard manages to manipulate his own memory (at the end of the movie) was very cool.
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Post by Fluffy on Jan 14, 2007 12:22:46 GMT -5
I think the hotel clerk must have been involved, because of a couple of lines in which characters referred to using the Discount Inn *again*, as though this had happened before.
The thing that kills me is that the hotel clerk, as well as Natalie and other characters (including, as you say, Teddy), couldn't help liking Leonard. This was visible in each scene where Leonard didn't remember them - Natalie was a little bitter about it in places, but for the most part, they seemed to think he was a genuinely nice guy. Makes you wonder if all of us would be taken for nice people if we didn't appear to have enough short term memory for people to assume that we have motives, you know?
And the more I think about the tattoos, the more I think that symbolises the way all of us end up keeping a short list of stories we tell ourselves about our pasts. Like, I never end up recounting to other people the fact that I used to cross-stitch obnoxious little Christmas ornaments just to have something to give to my very Christian relatives at the holidays, you know? That's not tattooed on my selfhood, as it were, and in fact I almost didn't remember that about myself, while on the other hand, everybody knows I've read Harry Potter, so it's like - I have a mental tattoo of a lightning-bolt scar, but not one of little rows of coloured x's.
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Post by Ritsu on Jan 14, 2007 15:29:18 GMT -5
Just one question before I write anything else:
Who has read the book by Christopher Priest?
I loved the movie. But.
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Post by Fluffy on Jan 21, 2007 12:39:56 GMT -5
But, because of the book? Why but?
(It's good to see you!)
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Post by Ritsu on Feb 25, 2007 16:14:09 GMT -5
(Strange, I kept coming here to check on new replies but I never saw any, now I come here and there's your reply from 21st Jan. Weird.) Yes, my but is because of the book. I read the book right before watching the movie (terribly wrong of me, I know, but it was even worse than it seems: I was halfway through it when I saw the movie, and finished it afterwards) so I think that makes the disappointment bigger. I suspect that if I had read it a couple of months before I wouldn't've felt a thing. I'm not saying the movie isn't any good. It is. The movie's fantastic, it makes you watch the screen closely (as the tagline already suggested ) and it has this sort of pace, of rythm that I hadn't seen in a while in suspense/thriller movies. But the book has so much more of it. It begins in present time (or present time when Priest wrote it), with two characters we soon learn are Angier's and Borden's descendants. From the very first minute we're introduced to Borden's descendant, we sense this aura of inexplicable mystery as soon as he says he has always felt the presence of someone else always watching for him, like the bond twin brothers feel. He was sure he had a twin brother, but couldn't locate him and he wasn't registered in any records or birth certificates or any kind of document. This is the starting point. And as you're reading it, this information never seems to leave your mind and every little detail that's given you try to connect to that lost twin. The book has two major segments: Borden's journal and Angier's journal, just like the movie. Those segments are intercalated by present time action, when they learn their ancestors (wrong word?) quarrels, etc. I'm not giving anything else away, but here's where the movie diverges more from the book: 1. The movie portrays Angier as the bad guy, the imoral guy and Borden as the victim. This is wrong. There is no indication in the book for that. Besides, I don't know if this happens to you, you tend to sympathize with Angier during the film until his final "manoeuvre" is revelated, right? At least it happened to me. In the book, there is no final "manoeuvre", no horrible trick on Borden to make you change his mind about it. And he did feel haunted by what he had to do to his Prestiges, he wasn't so amoral about them as the movie suggests. 2. There are no fake journals. You know those great scenes when they realise the journals they were reading were fake through the line "yes, you Borden", etc? That doesn't happen. The journals we read are authentic. At least Angier's is, Borden's a bit confusing at parts. 3. There's no Borden going to jail thing. And no daughter trama. 4. The ending. And that's that. I now can separate the book from the movie. But I was a bit sad when I left the theatre. But now yes, the movie is superb and the book is even better. Each in its own way. I really suggest you reading it!
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Post by Fluffy on Feb 25, 2007 18:46:50 GMT -5
Weird... your points 1. and 2. were exactly the two problems I had with the film Now I have to read the book. I still think the film is awesome as a film, especially in comparison with the tripe usually in the theatres , but the book sounds so good....
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Calavera Diablos
Ravenclaw Alumni
Draws grown men wearing underpants outside their trousers
Posts: 1,547
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Post by Calavera Diablos on Jan 6, 2011 2:32:57 GMT -5
I haven't read the novel yet, but Lorelai hit the nail on the head with 1, 2, and 4.
I was enjoying myself, until I saw the hats and thought "Nah, they wouldn't"...then the film veered a hard left into science fiction and gave me genre whiplash. I'd rather know that the film is going to be inclusive of fantasy elements ahead of time, since that honestly felt like a "Oh crud, I don't know how to end the film *CHANGES THE PLOT AT THE LAST MINUTE*" move. I was looking forward to either having a realistic reveal of Angler's prestige or having the ending be more ambiguous and continue to focus on the intense relationship between Borden and Angler. And when those damn hints kept popping up, I think I actually went into a state of furious denial, since that seemed... well, cheap? I guess my expectations were elsewhere.
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