Movies you've just watched

[GaijinPunch]

I have not read the book.
The plot device of having people from "the future" obsessed, not with their own nostalgia but with the nostalgia of a person from the past, is used unironically?

I did. And while I enjoyed it to an extent (it's an easy airplane read... I didn't enjoy it like I would say... Clarke) I was over the 80's schmaltz by about halfway through, and as you can imagine, that is the main substance. As a book, having a kid obsessed with pop culture from 60 years prior I guess works. As a film, I question the sanity of the producers. The trailer was enough for me. At no point did I think the book would make a good film. A sentiment I shared with The Martian, which I also never saw.

Please, somebody tell me that this Ernest Cline fellow, is not this fucking stupid?

He's apparently a one hit wonder, if you consider the first book a hit. His second book seems to be pretty meh.

[soprano1]

A Hard Day's Night (1964)
The dialogue and the jokes were pretty great, making the movie worth watching indeed.

[neorichieb1971]

Kubo and the 2 strings

I'd heard this is an amazing movie. I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't reach those dizzying peaks for me. Its not a bad movie and its certainly the sort of imagination that I usually like. The problem is that the villain is largely absent in the movie and the story is carried by the charm of the main character. This movie reminds me of the 1980's Sinbad movies just done in stop frame animation.

On the bright side it has some of the best stop frame animation i've ever seen and the audio is fantastic. This was all shot in proper 3D so I might buy the 3D blu ray as well as its obviously going to be a thrilling ride.

7.5/10

[lilmanjs]

The Lady in A Black Dress
A Japanese noire/gangster movie from 1987. A lady gets picked up on the way to Tokyo and sees a man get stabbed once she arrives. Goes to a bar where a former in-law works and becomes a live-in worker. A slow moving movie but works. We get a gangster trying trying to get out of Japan, who gets mixed up in all this with the girl running away from gangsters as well. Enjoyed this a lot.

[InspiringMike]

The Big Lebowski (1998)

In my opinion, one of the best performance by John Goodman. Memes aside, this movie was ahead of its time, in my opinion. The pacing was good, the narrative was amazing, and the script was well-written. Definitely a must-see for those weekend movie relaxations.

[dan76]

This isn't a movie, but footage from an unaired Japanese doc about UFO's. It's actually a tour of Elstree studios in 1980 with interviews of Stanley Kubrick and Vivian Kubrick. As it's unedited some of it could seem a bit boring, but I loved seeing Julian Senior taking the crew around pointing out where The Shining was shot and mentioning Empire Strikes Back and "Spielburg's office is over there". I guess he was shooting Raiders.

https://youtu.be/fVlXbS0SNqk

Kubrick talks about the ending of 2001 and The Shining - only on the phone unfortunately. The Japanese guy is pretty useless, but the fact that his questions are so blunt and he hardly talks means you get a lot from Kubrick and especially his daughter.

It's an antidote to modern films and marketing. Worth a watch. Btw, it starts out with a fairly long drive from London to Elstree, and the very first street is where I lived for 10 years... Not that anyone is interested.

[GaijinPunch]

This isn't a movie, but footage from an unaired Japanese doc about UFO's. It's actually a tour of Elstree studios in 1980 with interviews of Stanley Kubrick and Vivian Kubrick. As it's unedited some of it could seem a bit boring, but I loved seeing Julian Senior taking the crew around pointing out where The Shining was shot and mentioning Empire Strikes Back and "Spielburg's office is over there". I guess he was shooting Raiders.

https://youtu.be/fVlXbS0SNqk

Kubrick talks about the ending of 2001 and The Shining - only on the phone unfortunately. The Japanese guy is pretty useless, but the fact that his questions are so blunt and he hardly talks means you get a lot from Kubrick and especially his daughter.

It's an antidote to modern films and marketing. Worth a watch. Btw, it starts out with a fairly long drive from London to Elstree, and the very first street is where I lived for 10 years... Not that anyone is interested.

I saw just that one clip (targeted at me by my phone, ironically... go AI!) and wondered if the statement would be as polarizing as the film. Thanks for the link of the whole thing... will check it out.

According to the article I read, the footage was sold on Ebay a couple of years ago. Presumably the current owner shared it on YT.

[Zen]

This is gold. Thanks Dan.
What a time capsule!
The opening road trip, shot in silence, has me hearing Dies Irae in my head

[dan76]

Yeah it's great. Interesting because my gf works on big budget movies and she was saying how some things are different but it's still mostly the same. For instance, a lot of the jobs she's worked on there is a dog or two in the office. It's usually chaos and no one really knows what's going to be filmed. There was one big film out recently where they didn't have a script, what they based the story on was what locations they could have and what was allowed to be shot...

Very revealing how Vivian says sometimes they would just forget to film something. A lot of the time with Kubrick people like to think he was some kind of great visionary, which he might be, but that doesn't mean he had everything planned out from the start. From what I've read he was almost the opposite. Get things set up and see where we can go.

I think Vivian also shot a ton of footage for Full Metal Jacket but only a few fragments of that have ever surfaced. Man I'd kill to see those hours of footage from the making of The Shining.

Edit: here's the French tv thing Vivian might have been working on. It contains unused stuff from The Making of The Shining.
https://youtu.be/1w8Ykhk7FwU

[Stevens]

Going to see "Won't You Be My Neighbor" today. I've always been fascinated with Fred Roger's approach to child psychology.

[InspiringMike]

Would be seeing that as well one of these days. I definitely love Mr. Rogers.

[xxx1993]

Skyscraper was a pretty good Die Hard clone.

[BryanM]

Jay's story about the teenagers who were unimpressed by Jurassic Park (a hit movie brought to us by everyone's favorite producer Kathleen Kennedy) really reminds me of how fiction is a product of its times.

Jurassic Park was when CGI was starting to get really good, and it was still special. You could share the awe that the movie was trying to invoke. But these days where everything is a CGI cartoon - well, it's not unique anymore.

I might try forcing myself to watch the recent Asylum knockoff. The shitty SFX should be refreshing at the very least.

Slightly liked The Prometheus Trap more than Prometheus. (But not as much as I like making fun of Prometheus). It had a budget of about $16.50.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Jurassic Park was when CGI was starting to get really good, and it was still special.

CGI was pants in the movies (for years to come at the time*) and having watched it theatrically as a kid, I was disgusted (to put things into perspective, I disliked the 1991 Hook and 1985 Goonies about as fiercely whilst around that age). Disgusted not with CGI alone (although the most hyped feature being most gash added insult to injury), but just nearly all of it (writing, story, you name it). I was not wishing a single one of those characters well, in hindsight.

That was, admittedly, my age of easily getting angry with stuff, but wasn't the film targetting that very demographic?

If you care to know what I DID like of Hollywood family entertainment of the era, well, it looks like single parent-angled stuff was cool with me (not just single mother come to think of it, i.e. E.T. or Karate Kid, but something like My Stepmother Is an Alien was largely inoffensive in my book). Compensatory cinema alright.

*) Terminator 2: Judgment Day was an exception that proved the rule.

[soprano1]

The Third Man (1949)
Great suspense story in postwar Vienna. The characters were well written, and the actors did their parts well. Loved some of the camera angle uses, reminds me of the old expressionist movies. The music was very good, using a string instrument called zither. Worth watching for the setting alone.

[lilmanjs]

The Con Artists
A couple of guys break into safes and steal valuable things. They then decide to recruit a hotshot computer hacker to help them with a jewelry store heist and in the process the owner figures out who they are and enlists them in a crazy scheme to steal slush fund money sitting at customs. I enjoyed this Korean movie a bit and there was some pretty nice comedy and plot twists to keep you interested. Of note, all the songs in the movie (not score stuff) were in english, so that was a treat.

[soprano1]

IT (2017)
While overall the 1990 mini series was better (Tim Curry's Pennywise can't be beat), I didn't find this one too bad: the cast played it right, no complains there. Pennywise's effects weren't anything special, but oh God, that fucking dance where only his body moves and his head seems locked in place! It also had too many cheap jump scares, I don't think it need them so much. Also, I know it was the 80's, but damn did these kids swear!
Well, let's see how they handle

Spoiler

the next chapter.

[NYN]

We rented the the older and newer It on a weekend some months back. For a closer comparison.

Curry is fine in an otherwise dated adaption for a Tv network. There's a lotta issues which are not directly addressed in terms of child abuse and neglect since it's dialed back for audiences. I found myself short of evidence if Beth's father was just an moronic idiot or really the alcoholic fiend that I expected him to be. The new movie lets no room for doubt. There's also length and cheap fx like the Fortune cookie scene which is comical at best. But my biggest gripe is the structure of 1990: the adult protagonists are introduced shortly in their respective circumstances, when a telephone begins to ring and we are brought back to the past of childish games and scarring humiliation. After the first two I dreaded the next five aloud a little like this: "Aaah naw, man, c'mon! Finish your dinner! How rude!" "Nooo! You got the blond bunny on the sofa! It's consensual! Get! Back! Here!" "Girl, get a clue! Stab your misogynistic bastard of a husband, then answer the phone! Prioritise!" Oh, no! The image gets blurry! We are back in time. Again!

The new It just floats.

[Ixmucane2]

A Quiet Place

A good idea, ruined by a Hollywood style development and execution but still showing unusual coherence, a few great scenes and good acting.

A family lives silently in a farm, trying to survive the threat of blind monsters that seem to be everywhere and attack at the slightest noise. The monsters have already caused the collapse of civilization and (presumably) an enormous number of victims, but the low number of characters entails very few attacks on screen.

The first scene (the whole family tiptoeing around a deserted emporium in a deserted village) introduces most of the problems:

• Nobody speaks, for a very good reason, but the opportunity to make an entire film without words is deliberately wasted when after about half an hour someone goes to great lengths to be able (somewhat implausibly) to have a serious talk about their feelings (tell, don't show!) and when the characters whisper to reinforce what they are expressing in signs.
• There's music. In a story about silence, noises and hearing the director feels the need for plenty of meaningless intrusions of confusion and distraction. It's also devoid of any artistic value, even worse than the stupid but stylish Dunkirk soundtrack.
• There's a fairly standard plot about family feelings (the preadolescent daughter doesn't feel loved, for a reason, but she gets better) and the conclusion is that problems can be solved with solidarity, ingenuous use of salvaged technology, and pump-action shotguns.

The creatures are also not very credible, designed around plot needs rather than around a reasonable concept: too humanoid to be beasts, too inhuman to be mutated humans, too stupid to be spacefaring aliens; implausibly successful at taking over the world, since they just fight and eat, never showing actual hunting, let alone intelligence; too vulnerable and easy to control to be a serious threat; very good at hearing, but without the slightest echolocation ability (which would make them too lethal); unreasonably fast (to come quickly everywhere there's a character to scare without huge populations).

[Zen]

"Girl, get a clue! Stab your misogynistic bastard of a husband, then answer the phone! Prioritise!"

Annie Wilkes, is that you?!

[Zen]

There's a fairly standard plot about family feelings (the preadolescent daughter doesn't feel loved, for a reason, but she gets better)

Oh! She gets to feel better, does she?

Spoiler

Well, I'm glad she gets to feel better, having gotten the fathers beloved, youngest son, eaten alive because of indulging her "feelings" and then forcing the father to let himself be eaten alive,
to prove that he still loves her, to further indulge her "feelings" . . . but at least she got to "feel" better, so there's that.

And that ending, don't get me started. The "fierce women scene", featuring a mother, who was unable to walk up a stair, without getting everyone killed!

Ok. I feel better now

[Ixmucane2]

There's a fairly standard plot about family feelings (the preadolescent daughter doesn't feel loved, for a reason, but she gets better)

Oh! She gets to feel better, does she?

I consider this plot, feeling better or not, as grossly inappropriate for a survival horror framework as the cluelessness the whole family demonstrates.

And that ending, don't get me started. The "fierce women scene", featuring a mother, who was unable to walk up a stair, without getting everyone killed!

The mother and daughter have a sudden and unjustified increase of effectiveness and coolness, but what makes the ending stupid is that it is what should have happened all around the world way before the "day 93" when the film opens. Guns, grenades and other kinds of SPOILER are neither scarce nor far-fetched.

[soprano1]

In A Lonely Place (1950)
One of Bogart's best performances, and quite an interesting movie with great characters. Quite the sad, yet expected ending, too, no winners in this movie.

[BIL]

Interesting, I wonder if the Joy Division song of the same name was referencing that. Not that their stuff was ever overly cheerful, but it's an attractively distinct title.

[soprano1]

Interesting, I wonder if the Joy Division song of the same name was referencing that. Not that their stuff was ever overly cheerful, but it's an attractively distinct title.

Wrong thread, BIL.

[BIL]

Yeah, tbh 50s Hollywood references are more The Smiths' thing.

(although I see the film was adapted from a novel of the same name, which does sound a bit more Ian Curtis's style!)

[Zen]

Ghost Stories (2017) - Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman

Enjoyable Oldschool British Ghost Story collection, complete with shite ending
Featuring Paul Whitehouse and Martin Freeman, to boot.
It has a few nice creepy moments. Recommended, with the proviso that this type of thing is your bag.



The Endless (2017) - Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

Huge disappointment.
As a fan of their rather fine Resolution (2012), I was really looking forward to this.
I even sat through the watchable bunkum, that was their Spring (2014).

The Endless starts off well enough and features Benson and Moorehead as onscreen brothers.
Midway through, we are in familiar "Desert Cult" territory and still going strong.
Unfortunately, they decided to tie the ending into their first film, Resolution (2012). The resulting clusterfuck of retroactive lore building, goes exactly as would be expected.

If Benson and Moorehead had remained original and creative (and they have proven they can be), instead of succumbing to fart-huffing conceit, we might have gotten a story.
Its pretty easy to see the seams, where the forced tie-in ending is stitched on.
Regrettable waste of potential.

[Zen]

Glass (2019) - M. Night Shyamalan https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6823368/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Spoiler

[BIL]

[Durandal]

When you're becoming a parody of yourself