Nag Posted November 18, 2024 Share Posted November 18, 2024 Yeah... I liked Dark Fate too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maryokutai Posted November 18, 2024 Share Posted November 18, 2024 It has two aspects that riled up that part of the fanbase that likes to claim ownership of these stories and characters, which is I presume where the dislike comes from. Spoiler The prologue basically undoing T2 and the weird behavioural change of the T-800. No matter how you feel about those, I think the movie works reasonably well on its own. Like most Terminator 2 sequels I do find it a bit unnecessary but I did also rather enjoy watching it. Mackenzie Davis steals the show, I don't even remember who the supposed 'main character' looked like. Edit: Jesus Christ, that movie is five years old already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DANGERMAN Posted November 18, 2024 Share Posted November 18, 2024 I watched Joker 2 over the weekend. I'm genuinely surprised but I really enjoyed it. I think it's a good commentary on the kind of people who really like the Joker, who support terrible things for a bit of charisma, and how people will believe their own bullshit. I won't say anything else about it but it's not the film I was expecting I also watched Smile 2. I remember enjoying the first one, this one is focused on a single character. It really reminds me of that Trap film given how much it deals with being a pop star, which feeds in to bits feel like you're just watching trained dancers rather than whatever the smile is, but then I suspect that's the point. It's alright, predictable but decent enough Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maf Posted November 23, 2024 Share Posted November 23, 2024 I tried to watch Nope on Netflix. The Jordan Peele film about ranchers and aliens. Thankfully Netflix crapped out on the last 30 minutes so I don’t have to watch the end. I really tried to see it through but it’s so fucking boring I’m glad god intervened. Visually it’s very classy and the horror bits were decent. But the story and characters are really boring, the film is too long and it takes too long for anything to happen My final thoughts on the film? Nope Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted November 23, 2024 Share Posted November 23, 2024 After the fairly decent reviews that film got I thought it was pretty shit too when I watched it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted November 23, 2024 Share Posted November 23, 2024 Nope is a really uneven film. I didn't like it the first time I saw it but saw it a second time not too long ago and really turned around on it. But I have the same problem with it which is that it has too many ideas jumbled together and kinda struggles to extract a thesis from it, saying something about spectacle in cinema or animal cruelty or exploitation or something but it's kinda messy with how it goes for it. It feels like it's distracted by all the ideas it has and doesn't give any of them a chance to leave a strong impression. But as a 'bad' Jordan Peele movie, I still found it a lot of fun and can't relate to finding it boring. Just a bit disappointing. I still look forward to the next thing he makes. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shinymcshine Posted November 23, 2024 Share Posted November 23, 2024 Tarot (2024) it's just a bad horror movie - dumb American high school kids do dumb thing and some of them die - dumb di dumb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maf Posted November 23, 2024 Share Posted November 23, 2024 I watched another film called the Foreigner which is about Jackie Chan vs the IRA. And odd match up, but predictably bombs, guns and catholicism are no match for righteous kung fu 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmmark Posted November 24, 2024 Share Posted November 24, 2024 Movies I watched on the plane: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an absolutely crap film and vanity project by Ben Stiller. Just really boring and stupid. 3/10 Free Guy, another absolutely crap film but not as crap as Mitty. It was actually entertaining for the most part but with moments of eye rolling bad scenes. How the island was hidden but still visible is actually a deep cut for the audience it’s going after but also hilariously outdated given how futuristic the game is supposed to be. 6/10 Green Book is a fantastic film about a black pianist in the 60s who is well to do and as such finds himself not feeling like he belongs in a majority of communities. He is however very successful at what he does and hires racist Viggo Mortensen as his chauffeur for his tours. They end up bonding as you can imagine but yeah the journey itself is great. 9/10 Robot Dreams is an animation about a dog that buys a robot for company. The world is the same as you’d see in Bojack Horseman, so basically it’s a world of animals living as we do now but for some reason robots also exist. It’s a really nice animation but feels too long at times even in its short 1hr 40m run time. 7/10 Burnt is a Bradley Cooper movie about a chef that’s back after overcoming drug and alcohol addictions. He gets together a crew and chases after achieving three Michelin stars. You might have seen a similar movie Boiling Point which is brilliant. Well imagine that but take away everything that made it great and you have Burnt. It’s incredibly poorly written and acted. Avoid like you avoid green bits on bread. 2/10 The Founder is the story of McDonald’s and how it went from 2 brothers dream eatery to being taken advantage of and made into what it is today which is basically a bastardised version of a wee burger joint. Michael Keaton is great and it was never boring. I assume it’s a true story, it was shown as such anyway. 8/10 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
radiofloyd Posted December 7, 2024 Share Posted December 7, 2024 Absolutely loved Nope. My favourite Jordan Peele film. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pikman Posted December 12, 2024 Share Posted December 12, 2024 I just completed a back to back Max Max Furiosa and Fury Road session - so good!! I found the first one (the newer one) seemed a bit more CGI heavy, although I appreciate they are likely both quite heavy. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pikman Posted December 19, 2024 Share Posted December 19, 2024 Against my better judgement we watched Carry-on last night. It was OK as a bit of entertainment but it is not a good film, easily down as low as 4/10. I thought it might be more like Die Hard, where you are rooting for the main guy and he's killing it - but it isn't. There is a clear bad guy but the god guy seems like a mess and I never really cared for his success. I was waiting for it to kick into gear with a clear focus of where it was heading but it doesn't reach that until the last 20 mins or so. Meh, should have just watched more Taskmaster. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted December 19, 2024 Share Posted December 19, 2024 Pamela Anderson's favorite films. I found this vid cool cause a lot of the directors she's talking about I've been getting into recently. Got into the 60s period with Ingmar Bergman where his films start being less about religion and more about deep psychological stories with shit loads of shagging. I'd seen Persona before but not some of this other stuff. Also a timely reminder to watch/rewatch Blue Velvet 👂🍺 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maryokutai Posted December 21, 2024 Share Posted December 21, 2024 Went to see The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim yesterday, the animated movie that came out somewhat recently. It's a very mixed bag, but I might have gone in with expectation set a bit too high. Apparently it's based on a very short sidestory from the larger LotR canon that I was unaware of, but ultimately ends up being the most unimaginative and predictable 'revenge leads to war' plot ever brought to screen. The butterfly effect of a single punch leading to the death of hundreds of people is interesting to ponder, but that's as much as I could pull out of its narrative. The animation is a mix of 3D and 2D, not unlike what Disney did towards the end of their 2D animation era, but nowhere close to the perfect fluidity seen in Tarzan, Treasure Plant and the like. They've tried to avoid the 'talking heads' anime trope by making characters gesticulate and move their bodies around during dialogue, but use so few keyframes that it looks extremely jarring. Action scenes fare a bit better and some moments actually do make the most of the 3D/2D mix, and the actual drawing style is rather clean and nice to look at. There's one sideplot around the beginning of its second half that dragged the movie down quite significantly I think. I'm not sure if it was part of the source material but it felt utterly out of place, narratively, stylistically, in every possible way. Took me a long time to get over it and thankfully the last 20 minutes are really good. But I wonder what happened there and why they didn't just cut it. Good for a one-time watch I think if you enjoy the LotR universe. Enjoyed it more than the Hobbit stuff, even though that's not saying much, but it was nice to see the universe come to life in a different style (and to watch 2D animation on the big screen again – can't even remember the last time I had this opportunity). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maryokutai Posted December 26, 2024 Share Posted December 26, 2024 Watched Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore yesterday, which coincidentally barely features fantastic beasts and also doesn't really talk much about Dumbledore's secrets. It does, however, feature a racist wizard who commits voter fraud and whose supporters immediately turn on him when he gets exposed. At least they make sure you know it's fantasy. I think it was a mess of a movie, the high budget variant of an essay you might have written in school for which you didn't understand the assignment and filled up the pages with random tangents. I wasn't even able to enjoy the spectacle that comes with these blockbusters because the first 90 minutes are so dark it might as well have been an audiobook. And I have to say, it's rather funny in retrospect how they recast Johnny Depp but kept Ezra Miller in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted December 26, 2024 Share Posted December 26, 2024 I tanked Megalopolis, usually I'd like to sit with a film and absorb its meaning a bit but fuck man I dunno why I did that to myself. Had to sate the curiosity. The recommendation I read about this film was to watch it inebriated to meet Coppola on his same wavelength, which makes sense cause it's such a dribble of barely focused consciousness connecting weakly a bunch of concepts around creation and legacy and then settling on some vague theme of inter-discussion and working through difference. Or something, I'm not terribly bothered if I just provided an inaccurate summary or it flew over my head, I'm just a bit annoyed by the whole thing and inebriation does not help with it. The quickest summary I could give about its plot is Adam Driver plays a megalomaniac architect called Catalina Ceaser with the power to stop time, and is at loggerheads with the Mayor Francis Cicero. The latter played by Giancarlo Esposito, who badly needs a win cause he hasn't really done much post Breaking Bad and BCS but this ain't it. There's references to the Roman Empire, Shakespeare, multiple philosophers, we all already saw the 'Emersonian mind' scene on twitter I'm sure, it's mostly like that the whole way through. Ceaser wants to build a utopia built on a material called megalon, which is crafted from his wife I think, which rebirths material or stops it decaying I think. There's imagery of 9/11 at the end, I dunno. My issue with the film isn't its weirdness, there's actually sequences in the film that get really surreal that I kinda enjoyed. But a lot of it felt like the film-viewing version of being constipated cause getting something out of it is unproductive and excruciatingly painful. I will delay my rewatch of Apocalypse Now Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
radiofloyd Posted December 29, 2024 Share Posted December 29, 2024 Just finished watching The Holdovers which was brilliant and a very pleasant surprise. Recently I’ve caught the movie bug again so I’ve started watching a ton of movies, mostly low brow stuff but I did also rewatch Call me By Your Name which I liked the first time, I liked it even more the second time. Excellent movie and one of the best movies of the 2010s for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmmark Posted December 31, 2024 Share Posted December 31, 2024 Didn’t realise Gareth Edwards is doing the next Jurassic Park. Actually interested in the franchise again now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmmark Posted December 31, 2024 Share Posted December 31, 2024 MAXXXINE, A good little movie and finale to the trilogy that feels quite tame from X and Pearl standards. More of a detective noir thriller than horror but enjoyable all the same. Mia Goth has done it again 8/10 HALLOWEEN ENDS, I had to see it again as it’s on Netflix and so would be rude not to give it another chance and yeah like KILLS it’s a pretty big let down really considering everything that could be done for a finale. It’s all just so rushed in the end after focusing on a man that acts like an angst teenager. It isn’t a complete disaster and I think I give it points for not being as bad as KILLS. If this had been a low budget indie film that (twist!) turned out to be in the Halloween universe (a bit like what they do with cloverfield films) I’d give it more credit. Instead we have an alright “end” to one man’s take on how to ignore everything except 1 then screw it up spectacularly before going on to do an even worse job with Exorcist. 6/10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted December 31, 2024 Share Posted December 31, 2024 Rewatched Seven Samurai (1954) on the BFI 4k that recently released. Never have you seen the very fake looking bald caps in such high definition, the level of detail allows you to see the elastic band straining against their foreheads Watched it in 2 sittings which I prefer not to do but the film is super long, 3.5 hours. I usually like to watch something in one sitting but I find it a challenge with this film cause there's some elements I don't have much patience for, like the comedy. I do not like Mifune in this. I like Kurosawa's other films better I think, partly I guess cause this film is so insanely influential and originates this type of action film that it feels very familiar and cliche. But the best parts of his films are the scene composition, and the way people move through a frame. Also the B&W photography with the rain and the mud during action scenes. The detail in which they go into the plan to defend the village, which is my favorite part. Flooding the fields after the harvest and creating openings to isolate and pick off the bandits one by one. I really like that kind of methodical stuff in a film. It's what makes it such an interesting action epic still, even if I don't love it enough to call it one of the greatest films ever made for me personally. More like I respect the fuck out of it, or something. This whole ending scene is 10/10 tho. Look at how it's composed like a triangle, the graves pointing downwards to the surviving samurai. The youngest guy on the right a little listless and indecisive, like he doesn't belong or is unsure of his place in this society or the other with the farmers. Fucking great stuff --- edit I also watched Police Story (1985) for the first time, my last film of the year. This film is nuts. It's an action comedy, but the action is so brutal and hilarious, and Jackie Chan almost died in some scenes (for real) I'll not say more, check out the action scenes on youtube or watch the film if you haven't. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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