8 Ocak 2012 Pazar

Forrest Gump (1994)


"Stupid is as stupid does," says Forrest Gump (played by Tom Hanks in an Oscar-winning performance) as he discusses his relative level of intelligence with a stranger while waiting for a bus. Despite his sub-normal IQ, Gump leads a truly charmed life, with a ringside seat for many of the most memorable events of the second half of the 20th century. Entirely without trying, Forrest teaches Elvis Presley to dance, becomes a football star, meets John F. Kennedy, serves with honor in Vietnam, meets Lyndon Johnson, speaks at an anti-war rally at the Washington Monument, hangs out with the Yippies, defeats the Chinese national team in table tennis, meets Richard Nixon, discovers the break-in at the Watergate, opens a profitable shrimping business, becomes an original investor in Apple Computers, and decides to run back and forth across the country for several years. Meanwhile, as the remarkable parade of his life goes by, Forrest never forgets Jenny (Robin Wright Penn), the girl he loved as a boy, who makes her own journey through the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s that is far more troubled than the path Forrest happens upon. Featured alongside Tom Hanks are Sally Field as Forrest's mother; Gary Sinise as his commanding officer in Vietnam; Mykelti Williamson as his ill-fated Army buddy who is familiar with every recipe that involves shrimp; and the special effects artists whose digital magic place Forrest amidst a remarkable array of historical events and people.
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4 Ocak 2012 Çarşamba

Pulp Fiction (1994)



Outrageously violent, time-twisting, and in love with language, Pulp Fiction was widely considered the most influential American movie of the 1990s. Director and co-screenwriter Quentin Tarantino synthesized such seemingly disparate traditions as the syncopated language of David Mamet; the serious violence of American gangster movies, crime movies, and films noirs mixed up with the wacky violence of cartoons, video games, and Japanese animation; and the fragmented story-telling structures of such experimental classics as Citizen Kane, Rashomon, and La jetée. The Oscar-winning script by Tarantino and Roger Avary intertwines three stories, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, in the role that single-handedly reignited his career, as hit men who have philosophical interchanges on such topics as the French names for American fast food products; Bruce Willis as a boxer out of a 1940s B-movie; and such other stalwarts as Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Christopher Walken, Eric Stoltz, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, whose dance sequence with Travolta proved an instant classic.
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American History X (1998)


Tony Kaye made his feature directorial debut with this dramatic exploration into the roots of race hatred in America. In a shocking opening scene, teen Danny Vinyard (Edward Furlong) races to tell his older brother, neo-Nazi Derek (Edward Norton), about the young blacks breaking into his car in front of the house, whereupon Derek gets his gun and with no forethought shoots the youths in their tracks. Tried and convicted, Derek is sent away for three years in prison, where he acquires a different outlook as he contrasts white-power prisoners with black Lamont (Guy Torry), his prison laundry co-worker and eventual pal. Meanwhile, Danny, with a shaved head and a rebellious attitude, seems destined to follow in his big brother's footsteps. After Danny writes a favorable review of Hitler's Mein Kampf, black high-school principal Sweeney (Avery Brooks) puts Danny in his private "American History X" course and assigns him to do a paper about his older brother, who was a former student of Sweeney's. This serves to introduce flashbacks, with the film backtracking to illustrate Danny's account of Derek's life prior to the night of the shooting. Monochrome sequences of Derek leading a Venice, California gang are intercut with color footage of the mature Derek ending his past neo-Nazi associations and attempting to detour Danny away from the group led by white supremacist, Cameron (Stacy Keach), who once influenced Derek. Director Tony Kaye, with a background in TV commercials and music videos, filmed in L.A. beach communities. Rated R "for graphic brutal violence including rape, pervasive language, strong sexuality and nudity."
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Requiem for a Dream (2000)



Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr., this gritty drama concerns four people trapped by their addictions. Harry (Jared Leto), and his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) are impoverished heroin addicts living in Coney Island, NY, while Harry's girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) is a fellow addict trying to distance herself from her wealthy father. Harry dreams of scoring a pound of smack, from which he could make enough money to open a clothing boutique with Marion, but so far he and his friends can barely scrape by supporting their own habits. Meanwhile, Harry's mother Sara (Ellen Burstyn), who spends her days watching television, is told she has the opportunity to appear on her favorite game show; wanting to lose enough weight to fit into her favorite red dress, she visits a sleazy doctor who gives her a prescription for amphetamines. Soon Sara has a drug habit of her own that is spiraling out of control. Requiem for a Dream was directed by Darren Aronofsky, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Selby; it was Aronofsky's second feature, following his acclaimed independent film Pi.
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Snatch (2001)



Guy Ritchie's sophomore follow-up to his 1998 sleeper hit Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch revisits the previous film's territory of London's crime-ridden underbelly, and does so with the same brand of humor and stylish direction that made Ritchie's first effort a surprise success. With a labyrinthine plot that is ostensibly oriented around a missing diamond, Snatch introduces viewers to three groups of characters intent on retrieving the elusive stone, which has been stolen from an Antwerp jeweler. In the first group are friends and business partners Turkish (Jason Statham, who also supplies the film's voice-over narration) and Tommy (Stephen Graham), who join up with Mickey (Brad Pitt), an Irish gypsy and boxer. Turkish and Tommy make arrangements with Mickey to take a fall in a match engineered by lunatic gang leader Brick Top (Alan Ford). In another corner resides equally loony Russian gangster Boris the Blade (Rade Sherbedgia), who has asked Jewish gangster Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro) to place a bet on the match for him. Boris is also scheming to have Sol (Lennie James), the owner of a pawn shop, rob the place with a couple of dim associates. Meanwhile, Avi (Dennis Farina), freshly arrived in London from New York, hires Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) to find Franky when he goes missing; it seems that it was none other than Franky who was supposed to be transporting the purloined diamond to New York
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Roadie (2012)



A man has to give up a life of lifting amps and chasing groupies to take on the challenges of the real world in this independent drama. Jimmy Testagross (Ron Eldard) was a teenage rock & roll fan when he was growing up in Queens, and a couple years out of high school, he landed what seemed like the perfect job -- joining the road crew of hard-rock icons Blue Oyster Cult. After spending 20 years on the road, Jimmy is cut loose when economics force the band to streamline their operation, and at the ripe old age of 40, he has no idea what to do with his life. Needing some time to regroup, Jimmy returns home to visit his elderly mother (Lois Smith), only to discover she's growing senile and may need him to move in and look after her. As he struggles with the notion of facing adult responsibilities for the first time, he also crosses paths with Randy (Bobby Cannavale), who bullied him in high school and still acts like a spoiled brat, and Nikki (Jill Hennessy), Randy's wife, who dated Jimmy in high school and is still holding on to a fading dream of making it as a singer/songwriter. Jill Hennessy, an accomplished musician as well as an actress, wrote the songs she performs in character in the film.
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3 Ocak 2012 Salı

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

2009’s Sherlock Holmes found unexpected synergy in the pairing of Robert Downey Jr.’s impish charm and Guy Ritchie’s macho, kinetic visual style, reinventing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective for a modern blockbuster audience. The follow-up, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, employs the same winning formula while adhering judiciously to the Law of Sequels and its more-more-more dictates: more action, bigger set pieces, higher stakes, and a darker, more convoluted plot. But more, as so many past sequels have taught us, is rarely better.

Game of Shadows marks the emergence of Doyle’s most famous villain, James Moriarty (Jared Harris). Glimpsed only in darkness in the first film, Moriarty takes center stage in the sequel as Holmes’s foremost criminal foil, a genius-level university professor whose extracurricular interests range from horticulture to homicide. Holmes has deduced him to be at the center of a wave of terrorist bombings as well as the seemingly unrelated deaths of various titans of industry, but can’t quite discern just what the professor’s endgame might be. Composed and calculating to a menacing degree, Harris makes for a promising counterweight to Downey’s manic verbosity. But, as in the first film, Game of Shadows’ best moments are found in the comic interplay between Holmes and his reluctant sidekick, Dr. Watson (Jude Law), who is plucked from his honeymoon to accompany the detective on a trans-continental trip in search of clues to Moriarty’s machinations.

And it’s very much a boys-only trip. The female leads from the first film, Rachel McAdams and Kelly Reilly, are tossed aside – literally, in the case of the latter – in Game of Shadows, while the cast’s highest-profile new addition, Swedish star Noomi Rapace (best known as the original, non-emaciated Lisbeth Salander) is a curious non-factor in the role of a Gypsy (or Roma, if you prefer) fortune-teller. The film maintains only the slimmest pretense of a romantic subplot between her and Downey. Rapace, looking perhaps a bit lost in her first English-speaking role, can’t hope to eclipse the Holmes-Watson traveling road show.

Ritchie’s technique, with its signature blend of rapid cutting and slow-mo and super-high frame-rates – perfect for admiring the odd apple tossed in the air, or a piece of bark shot off a tree – is once again evident in the film’s awe-inspiring (and occasionally coherence-defying) set pieces, the most memorable of which is set in a munitions factory, with Watson wielding a gatling gun like an early T-600 prototype. But some of the novelty of the stylistic juxtaposition has faded since the first film. Ritchie tries to compensate by ramping up the firepower, to limited effect. Absent amid the hail of mortar blasts and automatic weapons fire is any real sense of intrigue or suspense, which proves to be Game of Shadows’ most vexing mystery
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