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Films II : The Filminator


Bob
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3 minutes ago, Nag said:

I remember watching that for the first time years after its initial release and wondering what all the fuss was about... 

I felt like that when I watched Poltergeist for the first time about 10 years ago. It was good. But clearly a Spielberg movie and not a horror.

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30 minutes ago, Nag said:

I dunno... it scared the fuck out of me the first time I saw it. I can't remember how old I was then though.

Yeah. I got that from a few friends I talked to, who watched it as teens or younger. Watching it in your late 20's dulls that edge a little.

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3 hours ago, OCH said:

I felt like that when I watched Poltergeist for the first time about 10 years ago. It was good. But clearly a Spielberg movie and not a horror.

My dad let me watch Poltergeist when I was about 6 as it was a "comedy" and I've had a fear of clowns ever since. I tried to watching it a few years ago and made it about 10 mins before turning it off.

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17 minutes ago, Nag said:

Shows how much I remember of the film, all I remember is skeletons and a very bright TV.😂

The part that stuck out to me was how he reused the melting face effect from Indiana Jones. That was my "I thought this was supposed to be a horror?" moment. 

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6 hours ago, Nag said:

Shows how much I remember of the film, all I remember is skeletons and a very bright TV.😂

It's the very end of the film and you think everything is resolved. The boy is in bed and there is another thunder storm, he looks about his room and all her sees is a toy clown on a chair, he turns back and the clown is gone, he then looks under the bed and the possessed clown jumps out at him.

 

That bit specifically gave me nightmares for months. A few years later I watched IT on my own (I think I was about 10 or 11) and that cemented the clown thing. To the point where when me and my wife saw the new IT film at the cinema, I nearly had to leave because I was having a boarder line panic attack

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12 hours ago, Nag said:

Tbf that scared the shit out of me too.😂

I've always loved striking imagery and visuals. So those kind of effects always wowed me. Never actually scared me. That said, I do recall parts of Jurassic Park (the first film I saw at the cinema) where I was hiding behind my coat😄

1 hour ago, shinymcshine said:

Off to see Spiderman this afternoon, it'll be the first time at the cinema since I saw Captain Marvel !

As I have a week off, I'm looking to see Spider-Man and Matrix this week. After the bank holiday and most of the crowds go back to school/work etc

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Back from seeing Spiderman No Way Home.

 

Enjoyed it, cinema had been refurb'd since I was last there - the viewing we chose had a massive wall to wall screen, reclining seats and loads of leg room - but sitting down for almost 3 hrs was pretty uncomfortable (after 18 months of not really doing so, even in lockdown). There was around 40 people in there, for a screen that seats maybe 250.

 

Noticed the cinema also has a 4DX and 270° screen options too. Sounds fancy !

 

Oh the film - yep it was alright.

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Watched the Kurosawa film Rhapsody in August, one of the last films he made. Not a classic but an interesting film that deals with the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, although it’s not a war film, more of a gentle family drama. The ending is quite memorable and moving.

 

I also finally finished the Japanese movie River’s Edge, I started watching it ages ago but I watched most of it today. It’s a dark film about high school students, with a lot of sex and violence. I’d be interested to read the manga. The characters are eclectic to say the least, but it never strayed into nonsense territory. By the end I liked it a lot. I really liked the main actress in it, Nikaido Fumi. And afterwards I realised that the same director made Crying Out Love at the Centre of the World, a film I watched during my last flight home to Ireland and one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen. Anyway, River’s Edge was good.

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That netflix film, dont look up. I can sort of understand the bad reviews, cause as it goes on it feels very sort of fragmentary. Apparently it got its filming halted by covid and it's hard not to see that it probably got rewritten to reflect its cynicism a bit at the cynicism of those in charge who played down the whole thing and let it run rip (Meryl Streep basically plays Donald Trump in this film)

 

Mostly tho it's supposed to be about climate change, which is way worse than covid. Apparently the film came together from conversations the director had with climate scientists, who apparently live in terror of our future cause they know what's gonna happen and we either don't or are too stupid to believe it. The final hour or so definitely feels a bit put together out of ideas they had (again imo, cause of the covid crisis). Lots of very hasty edits and strange story directions that don't serve anything. Anyway it's hard to see the funny side (it's supposed to be dark comedy), or even the message, but I guess the takeaway is climate change is going to obliterate us anyway so might as well accept it. Or something like that. Nihilism, init. Spoiler alert, but meh.

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I just watched Don't Look Up, too.  And yeah, it's very nihilistic and while it's characters are an accumulation of many different real people and ideas that don't always fly it's still very believable which kinda makes it not that funny.  Maybe I wouldn't have thought that 5 years ago but now

 

I think I'm not even that convinced it's supposed to be satire.  How do you even satirise this, it's already a joke.

 

I still sort of enjoyed the film but it is very messy and I guess I could be jokerfied enough for it.

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1 hour ago, DisturbedSwan said:

Bloody loved Afterlife myself.


Yeah you said. Made you cry. I could have cried too, at what they’ve done to what was once a comedy.

 

The after credits scenes are what I’d want most of the movie to have been. They tease the next might be an actual 3 but we all know it won’t be. 

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Dracula (1931)

 

This Christmas I finished my Universal Monsters collection with the boxsets for Dracula and Invisible Man, respectively. At time of writing, the last film - Phantom of the Opera - doesn't seem to have been re-released in the same collection? But I digress.

 

Absolutely loved Frankenstein. Although made in the same year as Dracula. After watching both now, I'd say Frankenstein (strange/dated editing aside) holds up a lot better. Unlike most of the others, I'd never seen Bela Lugosi's Count before. I grew up with Christopher Lee's Hammer Horror iteration.

Maybe that is the issue?

At a brief one hour eleven minutes, I was scratching my head by the end of it. I've read the book many times and seen several different adaptations. This, even in comparison to its Universal contemporaries, feels very bare bones. There are about 3-4 plot holes from story beats that are introduced and discarded immediately. Dracula has three wives. They appear twice. Seemingly make the journey with him from Transylvania to Carfax Abbey. Then are never seen or mentioned again. Much like Lucy Westenra. Quite important in the book and subsequent adaptations. She is "killed" (violence is handed very strangely in this film). Returns to stalk children as a Vampire. Identified by the main cast. Then is never seen or mentioned again.

 

Then there is the soundtrack. Frankenstein has some sound effects for example. Dracula has none. No noise but the speech of the actors and a wolf howl. It feels like a weird transitional film from Silent cinema to Talkies. To be released in the same year, they must have been in production at the same time? They just don't give off the same vibe. 

Lugosi himself, is fine. Visually he is ok, but he's no Christopher Lee. Reinhard (Dwight Frye) is the only other highlight. He plays up the insanity of the bug eater very well. The rest of the cast are passable, to dull.

 

The ending is odd. The narrative decisions of the adaptation are strange, in hindsight. Overall, beyond the aesthetic, this is the first dud of my Universal collection. 4/10 

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