Saturday, February 6, 2010

Matilda (1996)










IMDB


I was in need of some good, uplifting comedy to cheer me up so last night I went to bed at 2 am, started re-watching Matilda on my pocket PC and before I know it was already 4 in the morning.
I really have a lot of respect for mr. Danny DeVito. Not only is he a good actor, he also directed some great movies that I have watched more than once. Hoffa was excellent. Throw Momma From The Train and The War of The Roses are two of my favorite black comedies.

Matilda is a cute 6-year-old girl who is super smart. She has the worst parents in the world. Her bigger brother is a total ass. Her school principal is a walking nightmare. She has a great, caring teacher, though. Not to mention telekinetic power.

I haven't read the book by Roald Dahl but the movie adaptation is simply wonderful. There is none of the sappiness usually associated with children movies here. This is a film that can be enjoyed by everyone (except self-loathing, miserable people).

My favorite scene (makes me smile every time I think about it):
Harry Wormwood: Are you in this family?
Matilda: Mmmm...
Harry Wormwood: Hello?
[short pause]
Harry Wormwood: Are you in this family?
[switches the lamp off]
Harry Wormwood: Dinner timne is family time. What is this trash you're reading?
Matilda: It's not trash, Daaddy, it's lovely. It's called "Moby Dick", by Herman Melville.
Harry Wormwood: Moby *what*?!!
[snatching the book from Matilda and tears the pages out of the cover]
Harry Wormwood: This is Filth! Trash...!

Get the unabridged audio book at:
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/audiobook/roald_dahl_matilda_complete_and_unabridged.html

Get the e-book version in html format at:
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/others/fadfdfdsfg4.html

And here are the Rapidshare links for a good quality dvdrip:

http://tinypaste.com/093b9

Specs:

File : 968 MB, duration: 1:34:11, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video : 882 MB, 1310 Kbps, 25.0 fps, 704*304, Divx v5,
Audio : 86 MB, 128 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, MP3, CBR

Q-pel: No GMC: No PB: Yes (can be easily removed using MPEG4ModifierMod.1.4.4.exe).

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Neco z Alenky (1988) aka Alice


Alice thought to herself 'Now you will see a film... made for children... perhaps... ' But, I nearly forgot... you must... close your eyes... otherwise... you won't see anything.


IMDB


While waiting for Terry Gilliam's Alice In Wonderland to come out in theaters here in Montreal, Canada, I re-watched Jan Svankmajer's masterpiece: Neco z Alenky aka Alice (1988) last night. It is a wonderfully creepy, strikingly original interpretation of Lewis Carroll's classic tale. It must have been the fourth time I watched this film over the years but the enjoyment is still undiminished.
If you're new to Jan Svankmajer's work, this would be the perfect introduction. And then you will want more.
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Review from Washington Post:
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 23, 1988

What the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer does in "Alice" seems more akin to alchemy than moviemaking. His is an art of dark conjuring, brought to life more by the wave of a wand than the slap of a clapper board.

Anyone who's ever slept in the same room with a larger-than-normal-sized doll will have some idea of the atmosphere of vague dread in "Alice." The film begins with the words, "Now you will see a film for children. Perhaps." They're recited by a pretty blond child (Kristy'na Kohoutova') with large intelligent eyes and a willful expression. The child is surrounded by her toys, some bits of food left over from tea, drawings and other everyday items, all scattered in disarray.

It is out of these ordinary oddities that Svankmajer creates the inhabitants of Alice's sleep. Svankmajer's creations have a quality of wonderment, but of a very peculiar sort; they're partly enchanted, partly haunted, and there's a hint of the morphologist's lab in them, a trace of formaldehyde. In a corner is a glass case containing a large stuffed white rabbit, which comes to life with a kind of shiver. Donning a red velvet livery with a lace collar and a matching top hat, the White Rabbit breaks out of its case, pulls a pocket watch out of a rip in its chest and hurries off, eventually disappearing into a desk drawer.

Desks and desk drawers figure prominently in Svankmajer's world of symbols. Sometimes they're like rabbit holes, passages into other worlds; sometimes they fulfill their normal function, though not quite in normal ways. In one drawer, Alice finds an inkwell, the contents of which she drinks, causing her to shrink into a doll. Later, a bite of a cookie causes her to return to normal size.

"Alice," which according to the credits was "inspired" by the Lewis Carroll tale, sticks fairly closely to the story's basic plot. Along the way, though, Svankmajer departs from the original, in many cases using Carroll's words but taking the liberty to create his own action, his own world. Svankmajer's addition to Carroll's word games is the element of psychological danger. Alice's dreams have the scrambled frenzy of a child who has fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position. The images are troubled, menace-laden.

Traveling through the psychic landscape Svankmajer has created, Alice seems somehow to be at risk. The world seems to be in revolt against her, threatening her, bearing in. Or else it's simply mysterious, alien.

This mirrors a feeling that we often had as children, when objects appeared large and unmanageable, and grown-ups spoke in what seemed to us like code. Svankmajer possesses the kind of technical mastery that carries us over mechanical questions, allowing us to concentrate on the deeper meanings in the work.

But meanings, in the strict sense, are elusive. And what's more, you have no interest in pinning him down, in deciphering the messages. Svankmajer communicates through textures, colors, moods, and he delivers his ideas by implication, obliquely, in a nonliteral, though still accessible, manner.

If he has a deficiency, it's in his sense of narrative. For all its poetic power, "Alice" doesn't reveal Svankmajer to be a very natural storyteller, and occasionally we get bogged down in the enactment of his secret ceremonies. Not lost, but adrift.

Still, Svankmajer's sinister visual music has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational. It takes us back to a time in the history of movies when audiences responded to the images on screen with a combination of awe and fear, when in submitting to them, we felt as if we were submitting to a spell.
=================
http://tinypaste.com/655a6
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Specs:

File size : 1.36 GB (or 1,398 MB)
Type : AVI
Duration : 2:01:10
Audio stream:
Cds: 1 (not splitted)

Video
Size: 1010 MB
Codec : XviD 1.1 (Koepi)
Bitrate : 1165 Kbps
Resolution: 672*352
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Bits per pixel: 0.204
QPEL: No ; GMC: No ; N-VOP: No

Audio
Size: 388 MB
Codec : AC3
Bitrate : 448 Kbps
Channels : 5
Sampling rate : 48 000 Hz

Language: English
Subs: English (sub and srt)

The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)


The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)
Directed by
Maggie Greenwald

Written by
Maggie Greenwald









IMDB


================
Plot (from AMG):
The Ballad of Little Jo is based on a true story -- several true stories, in fact. Suzy Amis plays demure young Josephine Monagan, who in 1866 is run out of her home town after bearing an illegitimate child. Fleeing westward, Josephine is terrified by stories of how treacherous the frontier can be for a woman alone. As a result, upon arriving in the muddy burg of Ruby City, she disguises herself as a man, going so far as to scar her face to suggest that she's been in a few scrapes. In this guise, "Little Jo" does just fine by herself for nearly 30 years! Almost as good as Suzy Amis is Bo Hopkins as gunslinger Frank Badger, Little Jo's best buddy (if only he knew....) Written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, The Ballad of Little Jo does a marvelous job conveying the people and places of its period; and, unlike Bad Girls (which was released around the same time), we aren't bludgeoned to death by feminist revisionism. Unfortunately ignored when it went out to theatres in the fall of 1993, The Ballad of Little Jo has fared rather better on video.
================
Review (from AMG):
by Tom Wiener
Turning the feminist point of view askew, this film offers the premise that the only way a woman could prosper in the frontier West with any dignity was to disguise herself as a man. The fact is, given the constrictions on women at the time, this was likely the only means of prospering for a woman anywhere in America. But Little Jo, née Josephine Monaghan, has a better chance of concealing her identity on the underpopulated frontier, which also was democratically open to an entrepreneur with some talent and determination. Jo learns how to be a sheepherder from Frank Badger (Bo Hopkins), and then turns the tables on him by saving up enough to buy her own spread and flock. They manage to coexist as neighbors, if not outright pals, for the rest of her life. But her secret is discovered rather quickly by another outcast, a Chinese veteran of railroad work (David Chung), who becomes, in turn, her domestic servant and then her lover. Concealing both her identity and the affair almost overwhelms Jo, and the film is distressingly vague on the resolution of the couple's relationship. Another subplot involving a cattle baron trying to buy Jo's land is similarly unresolved. What the film is best at portraying is the isolation and terrible loneliness of life on the frontier. Writer/director Maggie Greenwald's next film, Songcatcher, also dealt with a woman venturing into a isolated culture where she wasn't welcome; in that story, the protagonist made few accommodations. In a rare lead performance, Suzy Amis is persuasive, but because of her character's understandable reticence, the real life of this party is Bo Hopkins' Frank, a man who's sure that Little Jo is some kind of peculiar fellow but is at the same time remarkably tolerant of him.
================
http://tinypaste.com/dd2e5
================
Specs:

File size : 1.36 GB (or 1,398 MB)
Type : AVI
Duration : 2:01:10
Audio stream:
Cds: 1 (not splitted)

Video
Size: 1010 MB
Codec : XviD 1.1 (Koepi)
Bitrate : 1165 Kbps
Resolution: 672*352
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Bits per pixel: 0.204
QPEL: No ; GMC: No ; N-VOP: No

Audio
Size: 388 MB
Codec : AC3
Bitrate : 448 Kbps
Channels : 5
Sampling rate : 48 000 Hz

Language: English
Subs: English (sub and srt)
Source: R1 WS DVD
Ripper: CroakerBC
This blog was created on January 15, 2010. Since then there has been a staggering amount of pageloads.