Movies you've just watched

[xxx1993]

The Mechanic (1972).

[soprano1]

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
Never saw this one before, for some reason. Loved it, animation and style were lovely.
Nice dialogue too:
Batman: You think you know everything about me, don't you?
Alfred Pennyworth: I diapered your bottom; I bloody well ought to... sir!

[Stevens]

Now that Animaniacs is on Netflix (I own them legit) I have hope that Batman:TAS will follow. Phantasm has been the best Batman movie since its release.

[z0mbie90]

Now that Animaniacs is on Netflix (I own them legit) I have hope that Batman:TAS will follow. Phantasm has been the best Batman movie since its release.

Thats nice. But unlucky for us in Sweden where Netflix sucks. We get all the new and popular shows mostly, but for classics and great shows it's another story.
We usually get few seasons. For example Doctor Who is from Season 5 to 9, but we miss 1 to 4 witch other countrys can see

[Obiwanshinobi]

Apparently the earliest Doctor Who seasons are incomplete forever.

[z0mbie90]

Yeah I read about that. I meant the 2005 revival where they number them Series 1-10
I did watch some of the early Doctor Who from the 60's when they showed it on TV, but couldnt get into it. But then a friend recommended the new show and I loved it.

[Mischief Maker]

It's a pity "The Evil of the Daleks" was lost. The plot synopses and episode fragments I've seen paint it as the perfect Dalek story where they were an intellectual equal to The Doctor before they went downhill and just ended up as comical killer tanks.

[BrianC]

Now that Animaniacs is on Netflix (I own them legit) I have hope that Batman:TAS will follow. Phantasm has been the best Batman movie since its release.

Batman and Superman TAS are on Amazon Prime Video. Netflix does have Young Justice, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited, though.

It's a pity "The Evil of the Daleks" was lost. The plot synopses and episode fragments I've seen paint it as the perfect Dalek story where they were an intellectual equal to The Doctor before they went downhill and just ended up as comical killer tanks.

Yeah, too many promising Doctor Who episodes were lost. A pity since Patrick Troughton is one of my favorite Doctors.

Now that Animaniacs is on Netflix (I own them legit) I have hope that Batman:TAS will follow. Phantasm has been the best Batman movie since its release.

Thats nice. But unlucky for us in Sweden where Netflix sucks. We get all the new and popular shows mostly, but for classics and great shows it's another story.
We usually get few seasons. For example Doctor Who is from Season 5 to 9, but we miss 1 to 4 witch other countrys can see

Actually, Netflix doesn't have Doctor Who at all anymore (I'm in the US). Amazon has it now, though only seasons 1 through 8 are part of Amazon Prime Video.

[Ixmucane2]

The VVitch: A New-England Folktale

A family of 17th century New England colonists, exiled from their village because they are religious fanatics, moves to an ugly valley near an ugly wood where they are tragically annihilated by a witchcraft problem over the course of a few months.
Some very brutal scenes, but the horror is mainly inside people's heads.

The constant religious perspective is great. Every character constantly worries about sin, witchcraft, the devil; praying is their main defense, but faith is both a strength and fertile ground for temptations.
Also notable is the avoidance of traditional witchcraft story stereotypes; within the family there is little space for accusations, interrogations, trials, burning women at the stake, etc. An evil presence is clearly established from the beginning: no space for delusions and misunderstandings. This leaves the whole budget of screen time, character attention and psychological sophistication for the much more interesting struggle against sin.
A relatively low-budget production, but well-made apart from the very inconsistent appearance of the woods (featuring uncannily appropriate vegetation for each scene).

[soprano1]

Chicken Run (2000)
Aardman are gods.

[BIL]

Borderland (2007) Overlong, ambling Hostel knockoff with the hapless freshmen relocated from central Europe to the US/Mexico border. Decent locales but low on dread, lacking in gore and weakly finished. Gave it a go after happening across the case of drug lord/cult leader Adolfo Constanzo, whose occultist murders this was inspired by. Don't bother (or alternatively, just look up the real story).

[lilmanjs]

License To Kill
Timothy Dalton in his second and last bond role. Pretty locations for sure, and a decent plot about drugs and such. Wayne Newton is good in this as well. He travels to Mexico to get the drug lord they capture in the beginning of the movie, who of course escapes, after said guy nearly kills his best friend.

On her Majesty's Secret Service
This may not be the best bond, but it sure is the prettiest looking bond movie to date I think. Sets look fantastic and the plot is decent. The only part that could have been edited a lot better is the luge chase towards the end of the movie, and possibly a couple of really awful shots in the ski chase. Other than that, decent bond movie, and a lot better than the one that ended up following after that.

[Grime]

壬生義士伝 When the Last Sword Is Drawn:

Kanichiro Yoshimura is a Samurai and Family man who can no longer support his wife and children on the the low pay he receives from his small town clan, he is forced by the love for his family to leave for the city in search of higher pay to support them. In his search he joins a notorious clan, known as the Shinsengumi where he does as much as possible to get money. Looked at as a money grubber,Yoshimura proves his strength physically and mentally by being loyal to his honor. During the dramatic period, with the rise of the Emperor and the fall of the Shogun. Yoshimura shows us the struggle of life in a personal way, by changing the lives of the people he meets and the way life is looked at.

[Ixmucane2]

Suicide Squad

Amanda Waller, a senior bastard working for the U.S. government, "recruits" some captured supervillains to form a team under her control, using the popular technique of remotely controlled miniaturized explosive charges, injected in their neck (after seeing the control panel, Harley Quinn comments that it's a "killer app"). Waller and Rick Flagg, her protegé from special forces who's assigned as a field commander of this "suicide squad", are comparable to Montgomery Burns and Waylon Smithers from The Simpsons, only with guns.
Due to a severe case of playing with fire (caused by Waller and blamed on Flagg) our "heroes" are soon deployed on their first mission. They defeat the metahuman threat of the week, and the reward for saving the world is going back to prison, ready for a sequel. Yawn.

The first impression is that it's mediocre, but if one stops to think about why it's mediocre it's easy to realize it's actually really bad.

The basic plot about diverse characters joining forces, finding motivations, and succeeding as a team instead of failing alone is highly traditional and sometimes touching, but it's normally applied to good people, if not heroes; here there's ambivalence between the threat of the mentioned explosive devices (not compatible with the shown levels of bitching and negotiation), various additional persuasion and blackmailing efforts (to which a proper sociopath should respond more violently), and appealing to the good side of the characters (not very successfully, for the sake of realism). In the end the characters cooperate because, given their high competence level, it's clear to them that it's the best way to finish the mission and survive; not the most interesting story.

Another way to start with the wrong foot is choosing characters at random. The team appears assembled without any attention to power levels and to fit between characters and with the general premise, according to trivially concrete functional areas: all-around brutality (Harley Quinn, aggressive but demonstrating the combat skill that could be expected of an average psychiatrist), guns (Deadshot, who makes more impressive shots in a background flashback and in a demonstration than in actual combat), area of effect and energy attacks (El Diablo the pyrokinetic guy out of nowhere), high-performance cutting weapons because it turns out they are useful in the final confrontation (Katana, who is sided with the government rather than a super-convict), silly weapons (Captain Boomerang, mostly a comic relief character), climbing (Slipknot, not even a comic relief character), operating underwater and physical strength (Killer Croc, treated like a second class brute who doesn't deserve a proper nice flashback about his origins).

Even random characters could be represented well and develop over the course of the story, but here a miserable failure approach is preferred. Deadshot's daughter takes the crown, but everyone is needlessly incoherent and hollow. Deadshot, after being captured by Batman, is merely at a low point of his professional life as an assassin. Harley Quinn is mainly an excuse for featuring the Joker, and the Joker is a violent hero who loves his girlfriend and rescues her with ingenuity and heroic determination.

Editing is a great lesson about the difference between hasty but purposeful storytelling, like in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and deliberately wasting time and increasing the things that need to be shown and explained far above what the director's talent allows, then cutting stuff without a plan.
For instance, there are numerous soldiers accompanying the Suicide Squad on their mission, with the purpose of engaging a horde of mooks in a couple of very long and very boring firefights, and stealing screen time from the main characters.
Scenes are generally distributed according to character and actor importance (privileging Harley Quinn, Deadshot, the Joker and his team, and Rick Flagg) rather than actual relevance in the story. Even comic book style complications and links with other movies are modest; chiefly, Batman continues to learn about metahumans (like a caveman learning about fire).

There are a few good ideas, but they don't go far. For example, a character is revealed to be more than what he seems, just to die an heroic death immediately after.
Good subsets that would have been vastly better than this mess include:

• El Diablo and a more practical sidekick, like Rick Flagg or Deadshot, engaged against the same main enemy (with a more complex plot than going in and punching each other).
• Amanda Waller's rise to power, and why nobody has killed her yet; with a side dish of conspiracy, Lexcorp, Wayne Industries, etc. and/or of the pathetically naive Rick Flagg.
• The rise and fall of the not too evil Deadshot and/or Killer Croc, in the role of worthy opponents of Batman.
• The love story between Harley Quinn and the Joker.

Bad direction also shows, as loss of control, in costumes. Why does Dr. Moone sleep in a blouse and a miniskirt? How can Waller be perfectly neat, in a clean white tailleur and without a curl of hair out of place, after a physically challenging offscreen escape from captivity?

Overall, a rare "missing link" in the disaster spectrum, sitting between decent ideas ruined by ordinary "honest" incompetence, and truly aberrant projects that direct their efforts towards being bad.
There is a wonderfully inadequate variety of the conservative mindset of many superhero stories, and the ridiculous breadth of neglected characters, plots and wasted opportunities, while a self-imposed handicap, seems an attempt to be faithful to the source material and tell a story.

[BrianC]

Ugh. Sounds like a mess. I like the way that the Justice League cartoon handled the Suicide Squad, despite having them under a different name (Task Force X). Amanda Weller ends up becoming a more likable character there, as well.

[Obiwanshinobi]

The 2008 Speed Racer - "this was the Sixth Reich". I verily HOPE it doesn't work as a "kids' film" because if it did, that would be too sad (them kids being our future and all that).

[atheistgod1999]

The 2008 Speed Racer - "this was the Sixth Reich". I verily HOPE it doesn't work as a "kids' film" because if it did, that would be too sad (them kids being our future and all that).

When that movie came out, my parents wouldn't take me to see it because they said it was too violent/inappropriate.

[xxx1993]

Saw The Mechanic (2011) yesterday in preparation for Mechanic: Resurrection which is coming out today.

[BIL]

Saw The Mechanic (2011) yesterday in preparation for Mechanic: Resurrection

No idea what any of this stuff is but that made me laugh, ta xx93.

ELECTRICIAN: RESURRECTION <-- It'll shock you!

[Squire Grooktook]

Mechanic: Daifukkatsu

[Some-Mist]

for some reason I was confusing the mechanic with the machinist and my mind was blown that they were making a sequel - I was intrigued ._.

[Obiwanshinobi]

The 2008 Speed Racer - "this was the Sixth Reich". I verily HOPE it doesn't work as a "kids' film" because if it did, that would be too sad (them kids being our future and all that).

When that movie came out, my parents wouldn't take me to see it because they said it was too violent/inappropriate.

Did seem quite Hitlerjugend 40k to me.

[BIL]

Mechanic: Daifukkatsu

[GaijinPunch]

for some reason I was confusing the mechanic with the machinist and my mind was blown that they were making a sequel - I was intrigued ._.

So did I. But w/ hollywood these days...

[BryanM]

Have joined the "not gonna watch Ghostbusters: Answer the Call even secondhand" team. 2 hours is a goddamn eternity. Why are movies so goddamn long. When 20 minutes to an hour is more than enough to say what they want to say.

Ex Machina

Is an okay flick. Even has a brief ghostbusters reference.

It has that thing where you can, how they say, interpret and talk about it. It's neat how the hero clearly does not like the wizard guy who's a normal bro instead of a spergy spaz. His negative feelings of envy toward the fellow definitely influences his choice to make poor decisions.

That's something you never see in movies. Characters with an opinion on the other characters. They all just kind of exist... as set pieces. Like a fern.


Space Cop

It is rare I have expectations for a movie, and even rarer that those expectations are met. Space Cop, matches both. The most beautiful shot of a man eating a hotdog in all of history.

My only complaint is that the rake jokes go on for a bit too long and the front end of the movie is loaded with too many of them.


Hellraiser

I saw this movie in the $1 theater when I was nine with my father and bro. It surely had no impact on my development.

Was reading the wiki page. It was amusing that 3 sex thrusts were enough for it to get above the R rating, but two thrusts was within the limits of the R rating. For a movie that should be NC-17 from the start. (It, just like the Saw movies, is on a different level than Terminator or Robocop.) The MPAA, people.

What was utterly shocking was the budget for this flick: $1 million. With a box office return of $14 million.

So quaint from the garbage heap we have today. It would be splendid if they'd throw $20 or $50 million (chump change in today's environment) at Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd and let them do whatever the fuck they want to do. It's disgusting all these suits ruin something that could have been pretty nice just to try to justify their own paychecks.

[BIL]

Hellraiser is good nasty stuff. Gets a bit slapstick towards the end but the human depravity at its core is meaty indeed.

I SAID DONT LOOK AT MEH

Jesus... wept... *DOKKAN*

Not quite Robogreat, but Roboclose!

[EmperorIng]

What was utterly shocking was the budget for this flick: $1 million. With a box office return of $14 million.

"How absolutely nuts: a creative movie made with vision and imagination, costing little to make and still turning a profit!" "That sounds too risky; we'd better find another 80s cartoon to reboot." "Now someone get those callboys in here to suck our cocks, pronto!"

-imagined conversation between Hollywood producers, circa 2016

[Mischief Maker]

It would be splendid if they'd throw $20 or $50 million (chump change in today's environment) at Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd and let them do whatever the fuck they want to do.

They did do that. The results were "Ghostbusters II," "Evolution," and "Nothing but Trouble." Can you blame them for throttling back and playing it safe after that?

[BrianC]

It would be splendid if they'd throw $20 or $50 million (chump change in today's environment) at Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd and let them do whatever the fuck they want to do.

They did do that. The results were "Nothing but Trouble."

fixed

[BryanM]

Yeah, Ghostbusters 2 had executive meddling up the ass, where they were forced to make a shot for shot remake of the first movie and warp things to conform to the cartoon show. There's a reason why they have a splendid commentary track for the first one, but commentary for the second, they will not make.

It was meant to be very different from what we got, at the start. Bill was especially pissed because he was bait and switched. It's incredible it has as many redeeming moments as it has.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) is what happens when you let them them write what they want to do. It is full of splendid things like meson colliders and Egon expressing his concern for the rookie by noting that his life insurance policy isn't in effect yet.

another 80s cartoon to reboot

Did you know the Ben Hur remake is out?

I've been waiting for this all my life!!!