Films II : The Filminator

[Nag]

Just got done with Under Paris on Netflix... French (although i watched dubbed which was fine) film about a shark that finds itself, funnily enough, in the catacombs under Paris... it was like the the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of shark films with a brilliantly over the top ending. 🦈

[Craymen Edge]

Under Paris was a lot of fun.

 

I had to find out about it by stumbling across a review and search for it, because Netflix apparently had no interest in presenting it to me under any category in my app.

[mfnick]

Just watched Under Paris as well, enjoyed it. Bit too long doing a whole lot of nothing near the beginning but once it got ping it was great. The ending was indeed brilliantly over the top too.

 

Horns - utter shite. How that got made il never know.

 

Road House  (The New One) - Very good dumb fun. Had a great time with that. Way too long though. Would have been a much better film if it was ~90min. But that’s a complaint with just about every modern film. Conor McGregor should never be allowed to “act” ever again. 

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Watched recently Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978) a few weeks back by John Cassavetes. Super low budget, self funded cinema verite kinda thing. A strip club owner gets in deep with the mob over debt on a fixed card game and is forced into performing a hit for them. It's very naturalistic and raw, which is kinda the thing with this guy's films. It feels like you're overhearing real conversations which you shouldn't be allowed to. I really really enjoyed it

 

I also watched Faces (1968) which I struggled with a bit tbh, it's basically how you'd imagine Don Draper's marriage to be. Constant infidelity. It can be interesting though and well acted. 

 

I followed this up with Husbands (1970) by the same director and it's the worst fucking shit I've ever seen. 3 guys, played by Cassavetes himself, Ben Gazzara (also in Chinese Bookie) and John Falk (Columbo himself) are having a 'bit' of a midlife crisis over the fact that their friend recently died. What follows is a lot of drunken bullshit and abuse of women and I'm fairly sure they drank themselves throughout this self indulgent waste of money. Real dogshit film. 

 

I liked Chinese Bookie a lot tho, maybe the gangster angle is what did it for me.

[Maf]

[Maryokutai]

Watched the latest Ghostbusters yesterday, Frozen Empire. It's a weird movie, just wanders along aimlessly from side plot to side plot for a solid 90 minutes while trying to set up a bigger threat but ultimately fails to do so because its inner logic makes no sense and the 'bigger threat' ends up being completely underdeveloped. Humour is of the annoying and not of the funny nature, with unnecessary references to youtube and twitch, the cast is way too bloated and it's really poor casting, too. Carrie Coon has five lines and is therefore completely wasted and not in my wildest dreams can I accept Paul Rudd and Patton Oswald as a scientist and historian respectively. It's also the second or third time I've seen Kumail Nanjiali play an absolutely insufferable comic relief role – I hope he starts picking better stuff in the future. I did like James Acaster in his few scenes, even if he does just play a toned-down version of himself.

 

One to avoid I'd say. I wonder if they continue with this IP, it's such an inherently 80's thing that it should have been left alone and now that the OGs are getting too old or even passed away in some cases it just feels like there's no foundation to stand on anymore. A bit like the Jurassic Parc situation but unlike JP this doesn't even make big money anymore.

[Nag]

Watched The End We Start From on Netflix at the weekend... basically the UK experiences apocalyptic levels of rainfall (sounds almost like real life) that results in massive floods, food shortages and refugee camps... Jodie Comer and her (literally) newborn baby have to try and survive the best they can.

 

I'd say to folk to give this a go, it's a great slow burn drama and Comer is excellent throughout. 

[Nag]

Atlas on Netflix... I'm not bothered if people are going to say it's a bad movie, it's basically Titanfall 2 and for that reason I had a good time with it.

 

Also rewatched Brightburn... I'd watched this a few years back and remember it being decent but that was about all I could remember... the premise of a Superman but bad story is so much more interesting to me than goody Superman tbf.

[Nag]

This is an actual 20 minute (including credits) fan made film... thought it would probably be better off here than in the trailers thread... maybe.

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Stuff I watched

 

Black Narcissus (1947) - This was a beautiful looking movie, Deborah Kerr plays a 'nun superior' who's to setup a convent in the Himalayas. Technicolor from this period hits different. It's all about ideological and sexual tensions between people in choosing a life of spiritual devotion as opposed to one in which you embrace life's pleasures. Being a film of this age there's also some pretty outdated representations wrt race (whole lotta brownface makeup), and it's pretty hard carried by its visuals, its embracing of artifice via matte painting and use of colour. I found it pretty good, but not as good as other films by these directors largely cause of those outdated aspects tbh. Especially when a character says some out of pocket racist shit, Red Shoes didn't have that

 

Civil War (2024) - Alex Garland's new one with Nick Offerman doing a bit of a Trump thing, though the political allegory remains an allegory and you don't get specific references to modern day politics (which seems to be why people in the US find it so polarising). I found it interesting tho cause of how it resists doing that. Very much a film that benefits from the right sound setup, watch it on a good system or with headphones and take in the full range of it. It's essentially like a reworking of 28 Days Later, which Garland wrote the screenplay of. A cross country roadtrip through a giant warzone, filled with fraught encounters with all sorts of assault rifle toting 'muricans (instead of zombies, you see).

 

Kirsten Dunst is a war photographer and so it's sort of about aspects of voyeurism in coverage of war, and it paints war photographers as being like ghouls. I don't know anything about war photography, I'm just saying that this appears to be what the film is reaching for. It seems to be trying to say you need to be dispassionate to a kind of inhumane extreme, but I've no idea how fair that is to real reporters working in these conditions.

 

I recommend blasting your sound system with it anyway, or your eardrums via headphones. It's probably a film supposed to be seen in the cinema tbh. It's an odd one for A24 to pick up but apparently they're going to try and go for these more broad appeal blockbusters, but with bits of subtext to chew on. I think I enjoyed the film but it seems clumsy, maybe a bit undercooked. It could have been longer and would have been stronger for it I think. I still recommend it, sort of.

[one-armed dwarf]

MaXXXine is getting divided reviews, but Kermode likes it at least

 

Vibes of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento apparently. It sounds really interesting and I'm curious what causing it to get such a blowback. I'll still have to wait ages to actually get to see it though

 

(wonder why they don't do reviews in the studio anymore)

 

 

[mfnick]

Furiosa 

 

Really good film. But pales in every single way to Fury Road for me. So ended up being disappointing unfortunately. Visually I also found it a lot worse. Has a lot of moments that just look really fake. Not something I felt at all (apart from that steering wheel bit) in the much older Fury Road - and that was a lot more ambitious. Weird. But still, good film and well worth watching. 
 

 

Edit - Rewatched Fury Road to be sure my memory isn’t playing tricks. Nope, it’s better in every single way & still just a perfect film. God damn it’s so fucking good. Can’t get over how much better it looks too, especially for the age. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Watched some rather murdery films about murdering

 

To Die For (1995) - Gus Van Sant. Nicole Kidman is the one being all murdery (or is she? you must watch to find out). She's a vain person obsessed with her image and being on TV, and has delusions of grandeur. Her husband is not so much into it, so he needs to get dealt with somehow. It's framed in an interesting way, a series of clips from a series of documentaries and TV interviews that take place after the events of the film and which gradually reveal how things happened and the psychological underpinnings of the main character's fucked up motivations. The plot is as you expect but I think the framing devices is what makes it fun. Not deep but very stylish imo and Kidman is great in it.

 

Peeping Tom (1960) - The director of this did a ton of films in the 40s and 50s which are among the highest rated British films ever. This film killed his career though. The reaction apparently triggered Hitchcock into not having press screenings of Pyscho, which came out the same year. It's about a guy who works as a 'focus puller' in films, moonlights as a pornographer and moonlights that as a serial killer of women. His fixation is capturing of fear on camera. It's all rather tame by modern standards but the actual method of how he kills people is pretty fucked up for a film made in 1960. His camera has a big spikey thing on it so he can record women getting stabbed in the neck while he records them, and there's some full frontal female nudity which probably pissed the censors off. Nevertheless there's interesting themes running through it wrt making cinema and a whole lotta subtext in there about the male gaze and muses, it's not mindless exploitation tho that's what critics at the time filed it away as. It looked fucking amazing in 4K dolby vision on disc, which is what I watched it on. HDR is great for the deep colours in these old technicolour films, but occasionally there's a scene with a bright camera light which makes you squint, which feels appropriate as well.

 

And I also watched Mad Max, but it was Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior (1981) also on 4K UHD from the Mad Max boxset. I needed a palette cleanser from some of the stuff I had been watching (not the murdery stuff, the more artsy stuff). Until now I'd only seen the original movie but this is the one where all that recognisable post-apoc iconography comes from, the stuff Fallout rips off. Except the assless chaps, I did not know that was part of this film's costume design. I don't know why they wear leather at all in the Aussie outback tbh, it seems a bad choice even if your butt gets to breathe. I like the first part of this film where it was like this wandering ronin/Clint Eastwood kinda character, barely any dialogue, just out for himself. When it gets into the meat and potatoes action and chase sequences I sort of tuned out a bit though as it became a bit threadbare. I understand that it's an immense achievement doing that stuff practical but I just prefer the bit where it was almost like a samurai film but with a shotgun

[Jimboxy]

5 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

Peeping Tom (1960)

I've not watched or thought about this film in years. It was on of the films I had to write about during Alevel film studies

[one-armed dwarf]

That is a really interesting film for an A level. I'd have thought it was ever so slightly racy but maybe that's a way to get students interested in an older film. Then again, it's really only racy by 1960 standards, 10 years later nobody would have batted an eye.

 

On our 'leaving cert' (same thing as A Levels) we did Cinema Paradiso, which is an amazing film.

[DANGERMAN]

we watched A Clockwork Orange right after it got unbanned as part of my psychology A Level. The lecturer watched it back in the day and was amazed how tame it seemed nowadays

[one-armed dwarf]

Watched The Irishman (2019) a few days ago. I think this is a really interesting film. It's not as stylish and showy as his other gangster films, but this feels like a deliberate choice. It's mundane on purpose. Early on there's a bit which mirrors the famous one-shot nightclub scene from Goodfellas, but it's in a nursing home and way less glamorous. It's less a party with a massive coke comedown than a slow, dutiful yet murderous dirge through to old age.

 

It's about this hired muscle guy who works for the Italian mob called Frank Sheeran, who is Irish so if you've watched Goodfellas you'll know that sets a ceiling on your promotion prospects. He plays sort of an insipid role in the film, he takes orders to kill and carries them out without question, which is a theme which the film wants to examine. He was also an enforcer for Jimmy Hoffa who was president of the Teamsters, a massive labour union of truck drivers. Key events in the film run parallel to the Cuba missile crisis and assassination of JFK, within which it will interweave a bit of its own mythmaking as to what actually happened there and the involvements of some characters. The version of events from the book it's based on are highly contested.

 

It's a really really good film, I put it off for ages cause of the digital de-aging and tbh that remains the worst part of this film. I can see why the decision was made with it, it actually works really well for Pacino and Pesci's characters I thought, but De Niro has too much of an old man posture in some of his scenes for it to be even mildly convincing. Also he's a guy who you've seen in action roles, heightening the disconnect. It's the only real complaint I have of the film tho, for a 3h30 film it kinda just speeds by especially compared to Flower Moon. I think it's tied with Goodfellas for my favorite Scorsese movie

[shinymcshine]

The End We Start From (2024 - now on Netflix)

 

Starring an awful lot of Jodie Comer, a little bit of Mark Strong and hardly any Benedict Cumberbatch - it's a UK based survival story of people being displaced due to a widespread environmental event.

 

Problem is, there's nothing particularly new, or even that engaging that actually happens in the 1 hr 40 min running time - not even convinced there's really any deep metaphorical message, so steer clear.

 

Note, it's one of those films with 88% Critic score, 61% Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes - I'm definitely feeling it's the latter.

 

Spoiler

Only notable thing is none of the characters are specifically named throughout the entire story (as confirmed by the end credits) so maybe this is the whole 'well, it could be you.....' scenario.

 

Setting is a little odd too, as there's no particular mention of time frame, although the cars they use are all a bit dated (like +20 yrs old sort of makes/models) and no-one defaults to trying to use a mobile/internet, so maybe it's supposed to be sometime around the 1990s ?

 

[mfnick]

Deadpool & Wolverine

 

That was fucking awesome!!! Loved every minute. Funny as fuck and fantastic set pieces. 
 

9/10

[Nag]

Our local Cineworld is a casualty of their "restructuring plan"... although I didn't use it proper regularly I'm pretty gutted to be honest. Getting the car out specially to go to the cinema isn't quite the same as being able to walk it and going for food/drinks afterwards. 😞

 

I'm hoping to see Deadpool there at the weekend and hopefully Alien: Romulus before it actually shuts but after that I think it'll be streaming all the way.