Movies you've just watched

[Stevens]

Not to be too cliched, but the book is so much better

Is there any movie that is better than the source material? Visual candy aside, of course.

As someone who has read Fight Club about a dozen times it's really close.

Two things keep it from being better - there is another catering scene that should have made it in and the ending is very different.

[WelshMegalodon]

Is there any movie that is better than the source material? Visual candy aside, of course.

Forrest Gump?

[Mischief Maker]

Is there any movie that is better than the source material? Visual candy aside, of course.

"The Shining"
"Starship Troopers"
Cronenberg's "The Dead Zone"
"Jurassic Park"
"Salem's Lot" 1979

There's more but I guess I've got Stephen King on the brain after this thread.

For the record there are many, many movie adaptations significantly worse than Stephen King books, especially the one King directed.

[wgogh]

King is no director, so its not surprising

[Mischief Maker]

Is there any movie that is better than the source material? Visual candy aside, of course.

Forrest Gump?

Forrest Hump.

[kaicooper]

What Happened to Monday - Netflix
very good Popcorn Cyberpunk Dystopian movie

[Stevens]

Is there any movie that is better than the source material? Visual candy aside, of course.

Forrest Gump?

Forrest Hump.

I'm more partial to Big Trouble in Little Vagina.

[MX7]

Surprised no one's mentioned Jaws yet.

Fight Clubis a great example, though the film is pretty intolerable too.

Had a true cinephilliac moment watching 2001 in 70mm in a lovely cinema in Amsterdam. Watching at home without an intermission, the absolutely essential overtures and mind destroying volume really is an unsatisfactory experience. At the end of the second act, there's a particular sustained tone that had half the audience clutching their ears in pain. And the positioning of the intermission is just exemplary filmic narrative. I also completely forgot just how funny the film is too.

[Ixmucane2]

Overdrive

Two brothers, very successful luxury car thieves, get involved with two enemy car-collecting gangsters. Either or both garages are going to become very lonely places...

The first impression is a Fast & Furious knockoff, but it's actually a fine heist movie with more style than it seems (I'm not going to spoil why, but it's quite extreme and special).

Differences with Fast & Furious are mostly for the best:

• Set in and around Marseille rather than in vulgar places
• Serious mostly vintage cars instead of mechanical monsters and fetishes, with a Bugatti 57 in the leading role.
  Bad guys drive the boring modern Porsche, Maserati, Range Rovers they deserve; good guys have an unlimited supply of elegant BMWs.
• Women are a valuable part of the team, on par with the two protagonists.

There are problems, like a bit of out of place traditional French comedy silliness and excessive bloodshed, but it's worth seeing for the car porn, the mountain road chases and the clever plot.

[Zen]

Charlie Wilson's War (2007) - Mike Nichols
(Fair warning. Absolute rant)

You know when go back to a film that you did not watch all those years ago and ask yourself "why the hell did I not watch that one?" and then you realise, too late, why you passed it over? Well . . . Charlie Wilson's War.

Jesus. Christ. Almighty!

I really do find this one fascinating, as we are all only just beginning to live the consequences of what is being grotesquely lied about in this film. It took a while for my mind to accept that this was not satire. That under cover of comedy, they were actually going to play this story straight.
This is a successfully entertaining, Hollywood propaganda layer-cake of the first order.

First; everything in this film is a lie (and there are probably more lies per minute than any other film that comes to mind).
Second; the mix (if not digestible) is made highly palatable with a sweet blend of comedy and personality.
Third; the sugar coated cyanide that is Tom Hanks (Hanks really is Hollywood's own boy. When they want to fuck you good, they bring out Tommy. If he was younger, he would have made a convincing Oswald and had us all re-evaluating the worth of the Warren report)

The film ends with a quote from the eponymous "front man" himself, the "real" Charlie Wilson;

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world . . .
and then we fucked up the end game."
Charlie Wilson

So, John Wanye meets "Oops!... I Did It Again". Really? That's how it went down?

Apologies for the political flavour to a rant in the movie thread but this film is quite something.
Many people believe that the "Beast" is so big, the only way to kill it is to starve it to death by not buying tickets to the show.
Not realising that they have already paid for the show via the misuse of their taxes.
In the tradition of the finest confidence trick, you pay for the bullet for your own execution . . . Roll up, roll up!

[xxx1993]

Netflix version of Death Note was at best another guilty pleasure of mine. Hey, if anything, at least it has an awesome soundtrack.

[NYN]

Pet Sematary (1989)
Rather cheesy, but horrifying at the end. The effects, i mean.
Doc went full retard at the end, too, even with the poor ghost warning him.

Yeah, but there are three things that stuck in my mind.
King's cameo. The Truck Driver of Doom listening to the Ramones. And of course 'Sometimes, dead is better'.
All hilarious.

[boagman]

"Logan Lucky"

Steven Soderbergh should have stayed retired. This was a *terrible* movie.

[lilmanjs]

"Logan Lucky"

Steven Soderbergh should have stayed retired. This was a *terrible* movie.

The trailer is the best thing the movie has going for it?

[boagman]

"Logan Lucky"

Steven Soderbergh should have stayed retired. This was a *terrible* movie.

The trailer is the best thing the movie has going for it?

By *far*. In fact, just assume that if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the entire movie. The trailer was *completely* deceiving to us. The trailer actually looked very promising!

Contrast with "Ocean's Eleven": at least with OE, there were actual attempts at humor every couple minutes or so. Some would land, not everything would hit, but at least it was relatively amusing throughout. This one? No.

[Stevens]

Surprised no one's mentioned Jaws yet.

Fight Clubis a great example, though the film is pretty intolerable too.

Not a Palahniuk fan?

[MX7]

Surprised no one's mentioned Jaws yet.

Fight Clubis a great example, though the film is pretty intolerable too.

Not a Palahniuk fan?

Oh no. I also can't stand a lot of his contemporaries like Douglas Coupland but I love Bret Easton Ellis so I can tolerate at least some smugness.

[EmperorIng]

Third; the sugar coated cyanide that is Tom Hanks (Hanks really is Hollywood's own boy. When they want to fuck you good, they bring out Tommy.

Case in point: Saving Private Ryan, which has its own subtle dark side to it, wrapped up in Tom Hanks "earnestness." Maybe it's because I saw Forrest Gump too many times as a kid when my parents played it, but I can't stand the guy's acting (or rather, lack of it). Big is ok, though.

What I watched recently:

Macbeth (1948) by Orson Welles.

This one is good, but weird. It was shot in 3 weeks - it looks that way in a sense, because of how few locations there are in the movie (one location with an arch and stairways is used a lot). In that sense it is very theatrical. Some of the costumes look cheap (like the crowns), but this can be overlooked.

The thing that sticks out about the movie the most is its lighting and set design. The lighting is heavy on shadow, which makes everything look expressionistic and moody. More so though are the sets, which make Scotland look like some hellish, unforgivable wasteland (can some UK'ers confirm this?). The castles look like they are made out of mud, carved into the hill. Everything looks soggy, dirty, and slimy. What an effect! But who would willingly want to live in this world, let alone be king of it? It is really a unique take on the setting, with even the presence of Christianity only seeming perfunctory and half-pagan already. The movie tellingly opens with the Weird Sisters digging into their muddy cauldron, to shape a dirty, wet statuette of Macbeth out of clay. We're stuck deep in the mud of human darkness for this one.

Some screens:

Spoiler

Apparently studio execs complained about the Scottish brogue compounding the difficulty of Shakespeare, but these fears are so extremely misplaced, given that it already feels as if the script was polished from the original to improve its understandability. The accents are a non-issue. The studios redubbed the movie and cut 30 minutes out for the USA release, which no one liked. Go figure. Original version (which is on a blu ray I picked up released by Olive Signature) is the way to go. All in all it's a fantastic movie, though not the masterpiece that Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff would be for Welles.

I picked up a lot of 70s movies I hope to watch and buff up on that decade. I've never seen Apocalypse Now, for example, so I picked up the box set (coincidentally with a Welles reading of Heart of Darkness). Though I want to read Heart of Darkness before I jump in the movie.

[boagman]

Third; the sugar coated cyanide that is Tom Hanks (Hanks really is Hollywood's own boy. When they want to fuck you good, they bring out Tommy.

Case in point: Saving Private Ryan, which has its own subtle dark side to it, wrapped up in Tom Hanks "earnestness." Maybe it's because I saw Forrest Gump too many times as a kid when my parents played it, but I can't stand the guy's acting (or rather, lack of it). Big is ok, though.

While I've hardly seen the exhaustive library of Hanks' movies, I enjoy his stuff far more than I dislike it.

[BIL]

Macbeth (1948) by Orson Welles.

Oh wow, this sounds great! :O Will have to watch. I liek my Maccy \m/etal as fuck.

[neorichieb1971]

Netflix version of Death Note was at best another guilty pleasure of mine. Hey, if anything, at least it has an awesome soundtrack.

I just watched it. I didn't like it. Kind of flat lined for me. 5/10.

I have no idea what they were trying to do. I do not think they went for the same vibe as the Japanese version. Could have been better.

Namely in the scenes where the cops were trying to find out who kira was and how he went about business.

[BrianC]

That version of MacBeth sounds interesting. I just bought the Olive Signature High Noon since I decided to get some Western movies. Previously, the only ones I had were Back to the Future Part III and Blazing Saddles. I recently watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Stagecoach with John Wayne. I enjoyed both movies quite a bit.

[Mischief Maker]

Netflix version of Death Note was at best another guilty pleasure of mine. Hey, if anything, at least it has an awesome soundtrack.

I just watched it. I didn't like it. Kind of flat lined for me. 5/10.

I have no idea what they were trying to do. I do not think they went for the same vibe as the Japanese version. Could have been better.

Namely in the scenes where the cops were trying to find out who kira was and how he went about business.

Agreed. I stopped it early...

Spoiler

...right when L grabbed a gun.

The heart of the anime was the cat and mouse game between Light and L and it fell apart when the show became all about the book and its rules.

I say the fatal flaw of this version was turning Light into a sympathetic character.

I also have no idea how anyone's supposed to follow this movie who hasn't watched the anime beforehand.

[wgogh]

I also have no idea how anyone's supposed to follow this movie who hasn't watched the anime beforehand.

And I have no idea why anyone who watched the anime would want to try to watch this

[BrianC]

I like the first two JP live action movies and the anime, but what I heard about the Netflix movie so far sounds cringworthy.

[Skykid]

Macbeth (1948) by Orson Welles.

Oh wow, this sounds great! :O Will have to watch. I liek my Maccy \m/etal as fuck.

It's wonderful.

[neorichieb1971]

I like the first two JP live action movies and the anime, but what I heard about the Netflix movie so far sounds cringworthy.

Near the end you have all this action, wtih cop cars all over the place smashing into everything. That tone that the Japanese version had is totally lost.

In a nutshell. Kira is celebrated, no panic. Kira is identified very quickly as if the very first person they suspected. It is all about the rules and there is too much relationship/high school BS. Who ever made this movie will realize pretty quickly he or she has not adopted many of the Western audiences that loved the Japanese version.

The movie would have worked 110% better if the time line of the Japanese was continued and the older movies referenced. There is no reason why Ryuk could not have gone to America after what they did in Japan.

[Zen]

A Dark Song (2016) - Liam Gavin
(spoiler free)

One of only a handful of genuine occult (for want of a better world) films ever made.
As a film I would say it is a success. The hidden motivations of the two main characters and the shifting nature of their reality comes through nicely. The film is shot well and the score is effective.
It must be said though, the film will be very slow and tough going for the general viewer.

A woman manages to hire a working "practitioner" to achieve her goal.
She has her mind set on the "Abramelin" working . . .
If you are not hooked now, I would say a very large part of the experience will be lost on you.

Now, the film is marketed as Drama/Horror.
It has certainly got the drama but its the horror tag that has me scratching my head for the following reason; if the writer, who at the very least put obvious time into studying and understanding his subject, just wanted an occult premise to his story, he seriously over-shot
(unless of course, he had always wanted to put his vision of the Abramelin on film).
His choice is like bringing a nuke to a knife fight.

The film is, obviously, shot indoors but will benefit from viewing on a large (the bigger the better) screen, particularly for a shot during the final sequence. You have been advised

My only complaint with the film is the way the woman's final choice is handled on-screen. It would take a very talented crew of director, editor, writer, musicians to get across a state of grace on film. As it is, the final choice might be in danger of coming across as a cop-out.

This film will not be a big commercial success and in all probability will vanish into obscurity. But it has all the makings of a cult classic.

[Mischief Maker]

And I have no idea why anyone who watched the anime would want to try to watch this

Because the Ryuk suit looked cool.

And I think you could totally make a great 2-hour movie out of the premise if you made it all about a battle of wits between a sociopath teen with godlike powers and a genius detective.

This movie instead puts way more emphasis on L's candy-eating than his detective skills.

Now one thing that was a definite weakness of the anime was the girlfriend character's depiction was so incredibly sexist I got douche chills. But that doesn't mean creating a version of the story whose whole point is that she's the smart one would necessarily be an improvement.

And I really don't like this whole DC murderverse/Dexter-season-two-and-onward morality underplaying the whole thing. Light has killed 400 people. One scene shows the aftermath of a Yakuza shootout he engineered littered with the dead bodies of innocent strippers. You can't arbitrarily make him the good guy just because he hugs his dad!

I haven't watched a ton of Netflix over the years, but they seem to be at their best with original ides (Narcos, Stranger Things) and not so great when continuing other people's ideas (Arrested Development, Voltron, and now this).

[BrianC]

I haven't watched a ton of Netflix over the years, but they seem to be at their best with original ides (Narcos, Stranger Things) and not so great when continuing other people's ideas (Arrested Development, Voltron, and now this).

I thought Voltron was done well, myself, especially since the original was already flawed. Unlike most remakes, it actually acknowledges that the JP original of the show exists.