‘Following’ Review 1998 – Movie Monday

Story: For Christopher Nolan’s first feature film, this is REALLY good. He wrote the whole thing, thought of the story by himself, and it was a really good story. Since it is a Nolan film, I expected some “HOLY CRAP” moments. The holy crap moment towards the end isn’t really “HOLY CRAP” worthy, but it was more like “Holy crap”. So I liked this one. I certainly felt the Nolanness of this one, it was very good. Nolan does it again by making us think of things were never thought of, like what do burglars think when they’re going through someone’s things in their home. All I’ll say about the end is, I feel bad for Bill, or as it says in the credits “The Young Man”.

Visuals: I heard that Nolan shot this in black and white since he didn’t have any lighting gear. This is a clever move and a tip to DIY filmmakers of this age. Sure, there are programs with color correction, but many people do not not that to have good color correction, no matter what softwares you have, color grading and lighing come in too. Many people don’t even know the difference between color correction and color grading. I know… so sad…

Music:  This had very little music throughout. David Julyan, who also composed many other of Nolans films like Memento and The Prestige, composed this one. I only really heard one piece of music which seemed to be the theme, but overall, I liked it really. So haunting.

Characters: Jeremy Theobald and Alex Haw did great in this. Lucy Russel was great too. Nolan did a great job of bringing out the best of not-professional actors.

Rewatch Value: I’d probably watch this again sometime to gather intelligence on films, since I”m a DIY filmmaker myself. Pretty good to watch if you want to learn since it’s the beginning of one of the best filmmakers in Hollywood of all-time, let alone today.

Movie Monday: “Takers” Review 2010

This was with the old template and this actual post was made quite a while ago.

IMDb:

Story: So back in 2010 I had seen the commercials on TV and I was like “Oh shoot, a heist film with a bunch of well-dressed guys, this looks good”. So I looked up the trailer online and I was even more pumped. But to be honest, the movie was what I expected. There really wasn’t anything like “HOLY CRAP OH MY GOD” in the story, but it had it’s moments here and there. Not to spoil the ending for you, but now they can’t even make a freaking sequel. If anything, maybe a prequel would be nice, but it could be pretty predictable.

Music: The music seemed to fit well. The big gun fight scene towards the end with the saddening violin music was somewhat unexpected but did set the mood a bit. It is was also in slow motion which made it more impactful. It was an unusual choice for music, but it worked. The film also some some nice songs from Kram, and Ambulance Ltd which I still listen to, to this day.

Characters: Oh my gosh I absolutely loved all of the characters in this movie except Paulie, and the Russians. I really wasn’t feeling Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez as cops or anything threatening but hey, every movie has a crappy character. The actors were pretty great and I loved the actors they chose for the movie except the cops. In the movie, we don’t really know much about the characters except who looks like they’re leader of the group (Idris Elba and Paul Walker), and who does the technical and planning (Hayden Christensen), and who’s the rookie (Chris Brown), etc. The problem is, you can’t explore the characters within a two hour movie based SOLELY on a heist in 5 DAYS. Maybe we could get more on the characters in a prequel?

Entertainment: The movie had it’s moments. Nothing two awesome, nothing too low. Overall, I was generally entertained.

Rewatch Value: Moderate. This is actually my second time of watching the movie. I’ll probably watch it again some time in a while.

Countdown To The Dark Knight Rises Schedule

Here is the complete schedule for the Countdown To The Dark Knight Rises, all week, at Retrospect Realm.

Monday, July 16 –

Tuesday, July 17 –

Wednesday, July 18 –

Thursday, July 19 –

Friday, July 20 –