DANGERMAN Posted December 30, 2023 Share Posted December 30, 2023 On 17/12/2023 at 21:06, one-armed dwarf said: Night of the Hunter (1955) - A religious zealot who has a penchant for telling sermons and murdering widows inserts himself into the life of a family, to do some bad shit. It's got a heightened nightmarish quality from how the music is composed and the scenes are framed (lots of shots in narrow hallways, and rooms which feel like cells). This was a wonderfully dark thriller which was like a sort of surreal fairy tale and felt as though it could have been released a decade or two later than it was, except perhaps for its ending which I think lets the thing down a bit. But it's a genuinely creepy performance by the main villain. But what's really doing my head in is the theme has this bit in it which sounds exactly like the opening music in Soul Reaver, the 'Kain is deified' bit. Need to tell Hbomberguy about this, and that's the 2nd video game I've mentioned now itt this is one of my favourite films. It didn't do well when it originally released apparently, I think it was just too dark. It's one of the rare films I'd actually like to see a remake of Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted December 30, 2023 Share Posted December 30, 2023 Just watched Sisu... which I absolutely loved, has a real Tarantino feel about it with the violence to go with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted December 31, 2023 Share Posted December 31, 2023 For a remake, I saw people suggest Michael Shannon or Joaquin Phoenix. Both which would work great but I'd have to imagine at this point Phoenix is feeling a bit typecast as the overwrought weirdo. If they did a remake I'd like them to keep it B&W, cause of how strong the style is with some of the shots. I'm on a noir thing atm and after Hunter I watched Touch of Fear (1958) and The Third Man (1949), the latter of which might not be noir but has that whole vibe to me. Third Man was amazing but I hated Touch of Fear, which was weird and had Charlton Heston in brownface. While Third Man was stylish and exciting, and had a great action sequence near the end. Weird sometimes how an old movie like Third Man feels so fresh, but how in the Touch of Fear it can just feel really.. old. And racist. Cool opening sequence though. The backstory behind its filming is interesting cause the production studio had people spying on Orson Welles to make sure he was doing as he was told. It was supposed to be his grand return to Hollywood film-making, but it didn't become a hit so he went back to Europe. It got re-appraised in recent times like Hunter did but in this case I don't see a reason why, outside of a cool one-take opening sequence and a few stylish scenes later on Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyKurosaki Posted December 31, 2023 Share Posted December 31, 2023 Finished watching Oppenheimer. I won’t say it’s a bad film. But it’s definitely boring. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pikman Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 On 31/12/2023 at 23:51, AndyKurosaki said: Finished watching Oppenheimer. I won’t say it’s a bad film. But it’s definitely boring. I loved it 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyKurosaki Posted January 2 Share Posted January 2 To each their own, I certainly won’t say it sucks. I’m into history, so it’s not as if I had a problem with the subject matter. I dunno, just wasn’t for me I guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
radiofloyd Posted January 3 Share Posted January 3 Watched The Pale Blue Eye, a very stylish and well made film but it has a lot of build up that doesn’t quite lead to a satisfying conclusion. 7/10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted January 6 Share Posted January 6 I watched Oppenheimer, I think this is a great film. I had sort of trouble with maybe the first 40 minutes of it. Nolan has this thing where his dialogue is super terse. Whether it's Batman or Prestige or this film, no matter the subject matter, the dude just won't let a scene breathe before cutting back and forth and I think that's a shame. It's clearly his style, but it gives his films a sort of hurried feeling, which is a strange thing to say about a 3 hour film. I even think if you add 20 minutes into the film and let scenes flow a bit then it would help That said, I suppose it sort of justifies itself cause the whole film is this super fragmented non-linear juxtaposition between reality and inner thoughts, theory and implementation, wartime political exigencies and self-motivated charlatans, a sort of tightly packed non-linear series of events which bounce back and forth in time and reach a climax with eventual fallout later in the 50s during the McCarthy eras. The narrative metaphor of intensifying fission reactions is kinda embedded into the film in a way that I found surprising once it got impossible to not notice (and they make sure you notice it, with the interstitial IMAX presented special effects of explosions and reactions during scenes). It starts off very messy and its tendency to not linger for a second in one place can frustrate, but then it kinda finds a way to harmonise, narratively speaking Its Nolan's most stylish film and overall his best I'd say, finally pipping Memento for me at least. It also shares that frenetic back and forth narrative structure, though it's not trying to pull the rug out from under you cause it's about a real dude and real events. I'll say again though on the dialogue that it's where Nolan remains weakest for me, a lot of actors kinda just being asked to spell things out in a kinda hammy way, RDJ especially. But for a film about this subject with this much money in it, it's a necessary concession to make A thing I'd say though, people can watch films however they want. I watched Andrei Rublev a while back, same length as this and similar to Andy with Oppy here I struggled with it and found it boring, but really liked the other stuff I saw by Tarkovsky but I did have to cut it up a bit. Sometimes you kinda have to do that. It worked well enough for that film. I just wouldn't recommend it with Oppenheimer as it's this dense accumulation of detail over the full 3 hours where every few seconds a new thread gets inserted which latches onto something else, which gets pulled into the larger framework of the story. Or the film resumes something from earlier and expects you to have remembered a particular conversation that occupied maybe 10 seconds of time and it is very very difficult to keep track of a lot of it. There's stuff I missed out on, I'm sure. Everything is sort of interconnected in a way that if you split it it would be much harder to follow any of its subnarratives because of how it hinges on recent memory and the momentum of the film's plotting. You feel this in the beginning and when it gets into the anti-Communism stuff, which forms the backbone of lots of where it goes. It's constructed pretty cleverly though, Nolan can still make brainy films. Glad I got this on 4k bluray as well, that I could make the choice of quality AND being able to hear what the fuck is going on. Will do this for his next film as well, cause of how awful Dunkirk was when I saw it Comfortably one of the best films I've seen recently, though not the very best 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmmark Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 Rebel Moon is BAD. So absolutely boring. Many stolen scenes from better movies made worse, looking worse and without any care at all. How can there be so much going on and feel like there’s nothing to see. This is full on the worse of Snyder and yes it is stuffed with slow mo. 2/10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 Watched a few films over the weekend... Fast X... the Fast and franchise has gone past the point of being so bad they're good, now they're just bad... I'm fairly sure it's just a vanity project for Vin Diesel at this point, this features some truly ropey cgi work. Props to Jason Momoa in this though, he's excellent. Saltburn... there's been a lot of talk about this film recently so decided to give it a go not really knowing what it was... truth be told I still don't know🤣 some great performances though and a couple of truly disturbing scenes. Worth watching definitely. Shattered... started this off thinking the main guy looked familiar, turns out it's Cal from the most recent Star Wars games. Guess you could class this on kind've a riff on Misery... with a couple of gratuitous sex scenes, something you don’t see too much nowadays. It's a budget film but turned out better than i was expected Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shinymcshine Posted January 12 Share Posted January 12 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) Never seen this American modern 'classic' before, and it was actually pretty good - most of the general themes are still relevant and the soundtrack rocks. Also curious is how many young actors got their break through this movie (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cares, Sean Penn, Judge Reinhold, Forest Whittaker, plus others in minor roles). Well worth a watch. Only thing that still puzzles me - and it's not specific to this movie - is quite how obsessed the US still is in making TV Shows and Movies about High School (and College) - there's just so many - whereas UK there's a relatively small handful - weird that the US seems to put so much emphasis on those school/college years (and how often they are portrayed as the best years of their lives....) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
radiofloyd Posted January 12 Share Posted January 12 Great point. I’ve often thought about it too. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shinymcshine Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 Saltburn It was okay, didn't particularly have any gripping or clever unforseen twists which I was hoping for, decent performances from the cast, but all a bit too average & forgettable really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pikman Posted January 15 Share Posted January 15 On 13/01/2024 at 09:52, shinymcshine said: Saltburn It was okay, didn't particularly have any gripping or clever unforseen twists which I was hoping for, decent performances from the cast, but all a bit too average & forgettable really. Nearly all forgettable, I wish I could forget just one of the scenes 😅 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted January 15 Share Posted January 15 Couldn't sleep so ended up watching Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) on my phone. It didn't succeed in helping me sleep. Barmy fucking shit with an insane soundtrack that's about a priest (played by Oliver Reed) who was targeted by Richelieu cause he happened to be in charge of a fortified town that he saw as a threat. Everyone was off their gourd making this film I'm sure. The first half was kinda cheesy but then it goes and turns into more of a feverish nightmare when the witch trials begin. True story also, well the actual historical event that is, not so much how it's represented here I guess. Should have watched something more boring 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyKurosaki Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 Going on a bit of an Arnie binge, watched True Lies and Eraser yesterday. Bloody loved them back in the day, and they’re still absolute bangers now. Today, I’ve noticed that all the Mission Impossible films are up on Paramount+. I’ve only ever watched the first one (started that again today). Guess I’ll binge my way through all of them, then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HandsomeDead Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 I got round to seeing John Wick 4 and I really liked it. I was worried about the run time but it passed nicely. I maybe should have watched the third one too because I've only seen it once and memory holed it a bit so while it's mostly self contained there were some threads I got lost on. The end of an era, and I did find it really satisfying. I also watched The Killer and I dunno how I feel about it. I thought it was a dark comedy half the time and other times it felt it was playing 100% straight. Then I wondered if the stuff I found funny was on purpose or not and by the end I didn't figure it out. I'm sure it must be darkly funny with the assassin being so self serious and pretentious yet he keeps fucking up, but then why the other stuff? I'm just going round in circles, and was while watching it too. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyKurosaki Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 John Wick was consistently excellent, across the board. I think there’s been a spin off based around the hotel? But I don’t know if it’s any good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maryokutai Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 Decided to watch the last Indy movie because of the game's reveal. Wasn't really interested in it when it came out because bad feedback + Disney + Crystal Skull being a tragedy, but I rather liked this one. You can still make a case about whether or not it was truly necessary to put an 80 year old in the ringer again, but Ford did his job well enough and I rather enjoyed the setup for the movie despite some absolutely horrible exposition quips throughout ('Archimedes was fascinated with water displacement'). My biggest issue is the pacing of it, they spent too much time in the prologue, then again too much time setting up the finale, which then itself feels a bit underdeveloped. But it also had a very cheap CGI look to it, so I presume they made these choices for economical reason. Poor Disney. For me this is right in the middle, far better than 4 and 2, but obviously not up there with the original or Last Crusade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OCH Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 Poor Things Imagine a Bride of Frankenstein film? But instead of a weird Mandela effect attributed to the last five minutes of the film. If the character in fact existed from start to end credits? That is this. Which is also very much a simplification of the general plot. Wow this film is so strange and surreal. From shot composition to set design. The weirdness of this movie cannot be understated. Emma Stone as the lead is fantastic in this. The whole cast is strong in fact. Note this is 18 certificate film for valid reasons. It's a fascinating character study in a very bizarre world. 8/10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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