It's a wonderful Life....
 

Touches the heart in such a loving way. I always cry at this movie....I pray that I always will.

OK - So I didn't see Downey, Jr. as SH in the first film
 

because there's only Holmes for me - Jeremy Brett. That said, the trailer for "Game of Shadows" just rocks. So who wants to see this with me?

Take Shelter...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1675192/

A mind twister, a movie I won't forget.

I saw 3 very very Impressively Good DvD's..
All of them made me think long after the credits rolled....

Adjustment Bureau


The Help


Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Stardust, and I bitched and moaned about how utterly horrific it was for 122 minutes.

Tree of Life

at this motel last nite
 

Columbiana.

The Notebook...... It would be nice to have that kind of love and devotion in my life one day )

Just Right.... love movies with Happy endings!

I can watch these two over and over again!
When Just Right came out my bestfiriend and I went to the theater and saw it about 5 times the first 2 wks (lol)

And here's another I cannot wait to see...




The Director of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy': 'It's a Demanding Film'
By Robert Levin
An interview with Tomas Alfredson about his adaptation of John le Carré’s best-selling novel

It’s been helmed by Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson, whose similarly subdued adolescent vampire romance Let the Right One In (2008) earned major accolades while inspiring an acclaimed American remake. So it’s no surprise that the story of George Smiley (Gary Oldman) investigating a Soviet mole at the top of MI6 is rendered in pauses and close-up shots: It explores the burdens of silence and the mysteries in what’s left unsaid.

Gone from this adaptation, written by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, are the genre’s usual propulsive narrative techniques, like the fast-moving action scene. Instead, there’s a general sense that the filmmaker wants you to do the work, to make the connections that foster an understanding of the combustible shared history of Smiley and his cohorts. Here, Alfredson speaks about his attraction to the material, the process of assembling his all-star cast (Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hardy are among the many notables) and more. The film opens in Los Angeles and New York today, and heads to wider release in the weeks to come.

What drew you to the material, especially given that the novel already had been brought to the screen in an acclaimed miniseries?

It was the book itself, of course. And also I remember the miniseries, when I must have been 10, 11-years old, seeing it. I didn’t understand much of it, but it was a very intriguing and interesting world to watch. It was also the people that wanted to do it with me, the production company and Mr. le Carré himself. "It is a demanding film. I want it to be demanding."

What about the draw of making a quiet, subtle spy thriller?

I don’t consider this a spy thriller, really. It’s much more about the victims of the Cold War and the sacrifices they made. That was what interested me the most — to actually try to understand what they suffered, these people. For instance, there was a very gripping detail John le Carré described for me: Some of the spies were decorated by the Queen. She would put a medal on their chests and ten minutes afterwards someone would take it away and hide it in a cupboard. I thought that was so, so touching and cruel, and really interesting, what they had to carry.

There is a lot of interesting stuff to explore in silence. If I would, for instance, ask you a question and you don’t answer me, that is also an answer. Silence between people is a very useful cinematic element.

What would you say to the possibility that some audience members might expect something more conventional and leave the film feeling perplexed?

A lot of people involved in the making of films are obsessed with clarity. I think it’s much more interesting to invite the audience to be an active partner in creating the experience. I really love the idea of trusting the audience to look upon them as adults that can have ideas themselves of what’s happening.

It is a demanding film. I want it to be demanding. And it’s quite true to the book as well. If you compare, there are so many films that decide for you what to feel and what to think and what you see. Film can be very decisive for you, but I believe that the more open you get the more the viewer can participate. But it’s not an easy film to watch. We haven’t promised anything else.

Smiley is a tough part to cast for a lot of reasons. What led you to Gary Oldman?

It was very hard to come up with the right idea of who to play Smiley. We struggled with it for six months or something. We almost said, “Let’s not do this. We can’t find the right one to do it.” And Jina Jay, the casting director, came up with this idea and I thought it was a brilliant one, to ask Gary for it. He is like a chameleon. He has done so many and so different kinds of portraits in his career. It would take a lot of courage to stand in front of the camera and have so much screen time without saying so much. And he really knows how to express himself with subtle moves and using his body language to communicate this. We thought that the camera should be like George’s mirror. He’s communicating with the camera. He shows stuff to the camera that he doesn’t show to the other characters around him. So the camera is like his mirror, or his little megaphone.

How hard was it to corral so many gifted actors into the same movie?

It was quite easy after we found Gary and he accepted. It was quite easy to get people on board or into a room for a meeting. I think 95 percent of the cast are first choices. It was easy to get them into the project.

In what sense do you think the film is informed by your outsider perspective, as a Scandinavian making a movie set in ’70s Britain?

I don’t think I know exactly what I see or what I don’t see. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m a foreigner and that I maybe see stuff that people from the same country don’t see, because they get blind to a lot of stuff that is specific to that culture. I’d seen a lot, as a kid, of British television and I visited England for the first time when I was 7 or 8, in the beginning of the ’70s and I tried to recall my memories from that. [Britain] was quite different from what it is today.

When you make a hit like Let the Right One In, you must be presented with all sorts of offers. In a general sense, what’s your process for choosing a project?

I don’t know. It’s a very emotional thing to choose material to work with. It’s not so important where it’s done or what the budget is. I think a film should have its proper budget and it should be interesting. You should try to see if you can do something with it and deliver something that’s interesting. Otherwise you shouldn’t. So I tried to finalize the work with this film and promote it now and then sit down and have a nice cup of tea and see what’s on the table.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...g-film/249724/

Hmm, let's see.

Horrible Bosses: Meh
Page Eight: Well done, as is every movie done by Bill Nighy.
Midnight in Paris: Not bad, unique enough to be interesting.
Being John Malkovich: I FINALLY get to see it, after years of wanting to see this flick. It didn't disappoint either.
Margin Call: Meh
50/50: Okay, mildly entertaining.
The Runway: Fun movie, if you're Irish like me, you'll get it.
Columbiana: Pretty good, surprising.
The Thing: Stick to John Carpenter's version.
Breaking Dawn: Zzzzzz.....huh, wha?

I watched Immortals yesterday. I liked it.

Breaking Dawn Zzzz?
 

What was so Zzzz about it?? i haven't seen it yet, but kind of want to. I really loved the first two movies..I thought the movies much better than the books actually, I wasn't impressed with Breaking Dawn (as a book) so I've misgivings about seeing the movie..god, I should just see it and get it over with :blink:

I enjoyed the first Twilight movies as well, but felt this one dragged out. It's almost like Harry Potter's last two; dragged out what could have been a single movie into two loooong movies.

It's been a movie kind of week. I've seen:

New Year's Eve
Immortals
and the newest Sherlock Holmes.

All really fun films and great distractions during finals..

I would imagine that when you ask what was the last movie I saw it was one at the theatre. It's been so long now that I'm really not sure what the last one was. It was either the first Twilight (I was dragged kicking and screaming) or 2012. Whichever one came last, that was the last one that I saw.
How pathetic is that???

Timeless movie, great choice! Over the past day or so, i've watched The Lake House for the four hundred bazillionth time, The Holiday (again, for the bazillionth time), Grave Encounters (knock off movie kind of spoofing Ghost Adventurers, not great) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (pretty powerful movie).

Saw Young Adult tonight, which was pretty funny. I really want to see Hugo next.

"Little Children"

Seemed interesting at first, but once all of the characters were introduced it was pretty easy to see how it was going to turn out.

Kate Winslet, as usual, gets a thumbs up.

The Other Woman in 'Albert Nobbs'
 

In the new film "Albert Nobbs," British actress Janet McTeer stars opposite Glenn Close as a cross-dressing lesbian in 1890s Ireland.



Playing a woman who has chosen to live her life as a man was a first for Ms. McTeer, 50, although she has more experience than most people playing women who love women: In the 1990 BBC miniseries "A Portrait of a Marriage," Ms. McTeer starred as Vita Sackville-West, a bisexual writer who had an affair with Virginia Woolf. She later played Gertrude Lawrence, a stage actress who carried on a romantic relationship with writer Daphne du Maurier, in a 2007 BBC movie "Daphne."
[ARENA] Robert Ascroft

Sex Change: Janet McTeer says, 'I wanted to play with the confident air of the cheeky chap who thinks he can get away with it.'

Ms. McTeer, who studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, has kept a relatively low profile in Hollywood since she garnered a best-actress Oscar nomination for playing a Southern single mom in the 1999 indie "Tumbleweeds." She is a major star on stage, best known for her Tony-winning performance as Nora in a 1997 production of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House," and as Mary Queen of Scots in a Broadway production of "Mary Stuart" in 2009.

Prepping for the film, Ms. McTeer became fast friends with Ms. Close, who co-wrote and produced "Albert Nobbs." Ms. Close, who stars in the DirecTV crime drama "Damages," asked the show's writers to create a part for Ms. McTeer for the show's fifth and final season, which airs this summer. In February she will appear in "The Woman in Black" with Daniel Radcliffe.

The Wall Street Journal: How do you see your character, Hubert?

Ms. McTeer: I always thought of Hubert as someone who considers herself not to be in a category, not in a pigeonhole, not with a label…. Yes, she ended up stealing her ex-husband's coat and getting a job and surviving [by passing as a man], but I am sure she did all of this without saying "I'm a gay woman." I am sure she had no idea what that concept even was. People didn't discuss it. And I imagine that she did it to feel safe and ended up feeling very comfortable.

See a clip from the film "Albert Nobbs" starring Glenn Close. Video courtesy Roadside Attractions.

Could you talk about your research?

Years ago I played [Sackville-West], and she wrote about this, saying she was always happier with girls but she got married because that's what one does. So when she had a relationship with her first girlfriend it was such a revelation that other people didn't feel the same way.

I think that if you were a gay man at that time, there was more of a circuit, as it were, than if you were a gay woman. There certainly were lesbians in Victorian London but I don't think Hubert would have been part of that scene. I think Hubert was somebody who ended up the way he did, and decided he was very happy the way he was.

How did you learn how to walk and move like a man?

I'd just watch men. Men's center of gravity is different. I wanted to create one of those very barrel-chested, big-hearted men, not a slight, tall, thin man. Women are aware of their chest, and I have a big chest, whereas with a guy, they just stand tall with their shoulders back. There's no vulnerability. I think that psychologically goes into the way you move. I wanted to play with the confident air of the cheeky chap who thinks he can get away with it. There's that Irish kind of Liam Nee-son thing—sort of big and chunky and very real. I kept my hands in my pockets a lot. I have very girly hands and I use them a lot when I talk in a way that I think is very feminine. There's nothing you can do about hands.

Speaking of, what kinds of makeup did you wear?

I had false skin, a false nose, false ears, false eyes and eyelashes. Make-up took 2½ hours a day.

Did you fool anybody on the set?

One day, I had been working and Brendan Gleeson [the actor who plays Dr. Holloran in the film] just arrived. He got out of the car and I just looked at him and nodded. He looked at me like, "Oh, I'm supposed to know who that is, but I don't." And I just smiled—for one split second I got him.

You and Glenn Close never worked together before. How did you first meet?

I was on Broadway doing "Mary Stuart" and she came to see the play with her daughter and after we had a chat. She said "I've got this script," and the following week she sent it. At the time, shooting was going to begin relatively soon, but it wound up being a good year and a half before she got the money together, during which time we'd meet and have coffee and we went off to do loads of prosthetic fittings and everything. By the time we actually started rehearsals we got to know each other a bit better. We rehearsed for 10 solid days, I think. We were in Ireland. We would go back to the hotel, have pints of Guinness and do jigsaw puzzles.

You and Glenn e-mailed each other photos of some women in Latvia. What was that about?

There's this culture in Latvia where if the family didn't have any boys, the women would live their lives as men. We started thinking, if you live your whole life as a man, what does that do to you? What does that do to your face? The lack of product, the lack of care. We've all got lovely skin, with blush and lipstick and everything. Up in Maine you see some of these women who are fishermen with unbelievable skin—the veins and the wrinkles. You can't fake that.

In a certain type of film like "Shakespeare in Love" [in which Gwyneth Paltrow dresses in drag] or "Pirates of the Caribbean" [with Keira Knightley], it doesn't matter as much if they are believable—they still look gorgeous. We wanted to really create a scenario when you could genuinely believe this character was a man. Also, we weren't actually playing men, so we couldn't fake an Adam's apple or stubble.

The Internet is packed with speculation about your sexual orientation.

I've always thought if you watch the performance and you don't know about the person, then you only see the performance. It's got nothing to do with me not being open about my private life. I could care less. I just want people to focus on the performance. Otherwise you say, "I know this person just had a divorce. I know that person just had a baby." You are putting what you know about the performer onto the character. That's not right.

By RACHEL DODES

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...392480236.html

I saw Four Christmases last night and laughed really hard. I don't wart to give away the story line but it's worth the watch if you like comedy :):

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
 

It is a fantastic piece of work, and is immediately by far my my favorite film of all time. I really couldn't say enough good things about it so I'll just end by saying that all other films are 'B' movies in my mind after seeing it.

We saw it last night. I loved it. I thought it was really suspenseful and well made. Rooney Mara's performance.....I can't say enough good things about it. She was fantastic, she was mesmerizing all the way around and has created one of the most memorable characters in a film in a very long, long time.
I would only say that if you are bothered by violence in movies than this movie may not be for you. This is most definitely a HARD R rating.

We also just saw "Young Adult" with Charlize Theron. It was really good, sort of a dark comedy for those of you who have never heard of it. I expect to see her nominated at Oscar time along with Rooney Mara.

the 2nd Sherlock Holmes...was pretty good! pretty funny too.