Recommended movies

United 93 is an awesome movie mate. Would seriously give that a go. Crimson TIde is good too for a bit of US Navy drama. Men of Honor aswell, one of De Niros most underrated roles. Shooter-again a US political thing with action and guns but i really enjoyed it, may just be the youngster in me that likes it lol Ill keep thinking of some movies, iv got hundreds and have seen hundreds more. ohh 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas, very weird storyline but a decent movie.
 
dear god no 1 of the best films ever

Mark Kermode disagrees...

There is an unwritten rule in film criticism that certain films are beyond rebuke. Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, 2001, The Godfather Part II... all these are considered to be classics of such universally accepted stature that they may only be criticised within a framework of first admitting just how brilliant they really are. Another example is Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, which is generally regarded as the high-water mark of angst-ridden Vietnam movies. Critics wept, audiences were wooed, Oscars were awarded - the world went nuts as everyone faced up to the fact that there was a new masterpiece in town.

Well, bollocks to that. At the risk of being thrown out of the 'respectable film critics' circle, may I take this opportunity to declare officially that in my opinion The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films ever made, a rambling self indulgent, self aggrandising barf-fest steeped in manipulatively racist emotion, and notable primarily for its farcically melodramatic tone which is pitched somewhere between shrieking hysteria and somnambulist somberness. It is a monument to everything that was wrong with American cinema in the mid-seventies, and a testament to the fact that, if allowed to do whatever they want, filmmakers will take their cameras and crawl up their own backsides. If you ever wanted proof that we really need producers like Joel Silver in the world (producers who will tell their directors to stop behaving like babies and cut to the chase now) then The Deer Hunter is it.

Oh, and that music!So what exactly do I loathe so much about this internationally acclaimed epic? First off, I have a very simple political problem with the entire movie. Since America invaded Vietnam, armed with napalm, attack helicopters, and enough fire-power to wipe out a small continent, how come The Deer Hunter spends its entire three hour running time telling us that it's the Vietnamese who are the homicidal maniacs here? Call me old fashioned, but doesn't it seem a little churlish to spend years torturing and destroying someone else's country, and then go away and make movies about what a rotten bunch of bastards your enemies were all the time you were there. Do we detect a little petulance about the fact that America got beaten hands down by a bunch of comparatively unarmed 'gooks'? (Or as Bill Mather says in the splendidly satirical Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death, "We didn't lose in Vietnam, it was a draw!")

Ask anyone what they remember most about The Deer Hunter, and they'll recount all those ridiculous scenes of brave GI's being locked up in bamboo cages and then being forced to play Russian roulette with each other while wild-eyed Vietcong psychos scream in high-pitched voices and slap them endlessly about the face and neck. They'll tell you how much they cried at the scene where Robert De Niro has to go head-to-head with Christopher Walken, and how shocked they were by the howling slant-eyed maniacs who gibbered around in the background while our boys did the manly thing. And, although they may profess some pathetic right-on anxieties about the lack of any 'positive' images of foreigners in the entire movie, they'll probably end up agreeing that The Deer Hunter is just meant to be one man's perspective of a hideous event and as such should be respected as an integral work of art.

What a total bunch of horse ****! Let's face it, Garry Bushell and Prince Philip couldn't have written the Asian characters in The Deer Hunter any worse. Even a right-wing nutball like David Irving would probably blush at the hideous level of national denial apparent in Cimino's film. If you made a movie like this about the Nazis, you'd probably get picketed for being unkind to the Germans. But do it to the Vietnamese and they give you a ****** medal. That's Oscar winners for you.

Secondly, on a less weighty note, I dislike The Deer Hunter because I think it's simply an extremely badly constructed movie, a formless incoherent waffle that looks for all the world like the work of man who just doesn't know how to 'cut his luvvies' (ie someone who is too precious about everything he shoots to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the editing suite). Trash maestro Roger Corman once memorably declared that no movie should be allowed to run more than ninety minutes without special papal dispensation, and in the case of The Deer Hunter this rule should have been obeyed. As it is, Cimino allows his movie to splurge uncontrollably over a monumentally dull three hours, bashing the audience into submission by testing the very limits of their endurance. To this day I remain certain that many of those critics who wept openly at the premier were crying not from emotion but from desperation - perhaps a desire to go the bathroom, or to feed the parking meter, or to eat and/or sleep. There is no reason for The Deer Hunter to clock in at this length other than as a cinematic ****-measuring contest whereby directors demonstrate the alleged size of their manhood by flaunting the ridiculous lengths of their movies. Like Spike Lee's excremental Malcolm X, The Deer Hunter is long on principal rather than on merit. This is a crime for which it deserves to be cut to ribbons forthwith.

Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, I despise The Deer Hunter because its success enabled Michael Cimino to indulge himself for years to come making some of the most flatulent, unwatchable and inevitably lengthy movies imaginable. In the wake of this Oscar winning hit, Michael went on to sink an entire studio with the abomination that was Heaven's Gate (stop moaning all you purists out there, it's a rubbish film and you know it), to insult audiences with the snore-athon The Sicilian (the only Christopher Lambert movie to be genuinely dull from start to finish) and most recently Sunchaser, the total failure which allegedly convinced Cimino to give up moviemaking for good. Hooray! Never more will we have to suffer this kind of auteurist nonsense! Ding dong the witch is dead! (Oh, and fourthly, that music! I'm sorry, but to people of a certain age, that dreadful John Williams guitar noodle is not the sound of people having a terrible time in the jungle, but of Tony Hart showing us 'a selection of your own pictures' in the gallery segment of 'Vision On'...)

If you look back at Cimino's career, you realise that, like John Boorman, all the good stuff he ever did happened before anyone started telling him just how brilliant he was. While his work on the sci-fi classic Silent Running and the efficient thriller Thunderbolt And Lightfoot suggested real talent ahoy, it only took a couple of enthusiastic critics telling Cimino he was a genius to allow him to spiral off into waffle with cack like Heaven's Gate and Sunchaser. And the rest - like Michael - is history. (In the case of Boorman, everything up to Deliverance was perfectly fine and dandy, but then some French theorist decided to inform John that he wasn't just a director, he was an 'auteur' and everything went horribly Zardoz overnight.)

As for The Deer Hunter, the only entertaining thing about the entire rotten enterprise is a spin-off drinking game which Danny Baker once allegedly played with Christopher Walken himself - The Beer Hunter. To play, get a six-pack of beer, shake one can enthusiastically, and then sit facing your opponent with a random can pointed at your head, pulling the flip-tops until one of you gets a face full of Colt 45. Hilarious! Shorter, funnier, and just generally so much better than the wretched movie itself.
 
shawshank redemption, se7en, clerks, eraserhead, chinatown, city of god, the mist, the king of kong, 50-50,
 
dont think she will! I cant get her to watch Game of Thrones :p such a pity! and plus, I am not allowed to watch it! hahaha
 
Yeah, same with me regarding Game Of Thrones :p

I do not watch many movies but rather watch more TV series. I can suggest a few of those:

1. The Mentalist (One of the best TV shows ever!)
2. Dexter
3. Parks and Recreation
4. Arrested Development
5. Sherlock (2010 Series)
6. Burn Notice
7. The Big Bang Theory
8. Chuck
9. House
10. Fringe
 
Yeah, same with me regarding Game Of Thrones :p

I do not watch many movies but rather watch more TV series. I can suggest a few of those:

1. The Mentalist (One of the best TV shows ever!)
2. Dexter
3. Parks and Recreation
4. Arrested Development
5. Sherlock (2010 Series)
6. Burn Notice
7. The Big Bang Theory
8. Chuck
9. House
10. Fringe

hahahah :) must be a Durban thing :p

I am also a huge fan of Series, and movies!

my top series: (that are still on at the moment, not cancelled or finished)

(have to agree with Arrested Development, one of the funniest shows in history along with Scrubs)

1) Breaking Bad
2) Suits
3) Modern Family
4) The Walking Dead
5) Falling Skies
6) The Killing (not sure if its coming back on again.. such a pity)
7) Community
8) Fringe
9) The Mentalist (just wish there was more to do with Red John)
10) The Big Bang Theory
11) Dexter
12) SNL (not really a series but love it)


(thats all I can think of now)
Noteable mentions:

1) Jericho
2) Flash Forward
3) Sleeper Cell

these were great but never went very far for some reason!
 
hahahah :) must be a Durban thing :p

I am also a huge fan of Series, and movies!

my top series: (that are still on at the moment, not cancelled or finished)

(have to agree with Arrested Development, one of the funniest shows in history along with Scrubs)

1) Breaking Bad
2) Suits
3) Modern Family
4) The Walking Dead
5) Falling Skies
6) The Killing (not sure if its coming back on again.. such a pity)
7) Community
8) Fringe
9) The Mentalist (just wish there was more to do with Red John)
10) The Big Bang Theory
11) Dexter
12) SNL (not really a series but love it)


(thats all I can think of now)
Noteable mentions:

1) Jericho
2) Flash Forward
3) Sleeper Cell

these were great but never went very far for some reason!

Probably ;)

Thanks, I will look at some of those as I am running out of series recently. I have heard good things about Falling Skies and Walking Dead.

I urge you to watch Sherlock though, awesome mini-series (Each episode is the length of a movie) and I think you will like it.
 
I don't think Raikans missus would appreciate that one. Although it is awesome. Or maybe it isn't.
in that case, there always Before Sunrise with Ethan Hawke
 
Mark kermode is a fool. He regards godfather 2 with the same disdain, his reviews are usually fanboy rants.

Sorry but that's not true. He likes the first two Godfather movies.
 
I have distressing news. Disney have bought Lucasfims for £2.5 billion. Disney are going to make a new Star Wars series of movies. I am now going to lie down :'(
 
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