Movies you've just watched

[Opus131]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSaaa_OBkzw

Never forget:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGohIKxc9M

[neorichieb1971]

Was nobody haunted by the fact 10's of rebels got the force of Darth Vadar with the fear of God in their eyes, and then 5 seconds later you see Leia with the Death Star plans in her hands with a big smile on her face?

Sorry, but I don't buy it. That would be like celebrating winning the lottery 10 seconds after finding out your family were serial killed.

No. They got away w/ the plans, and Leia really didn't see what went down in that corridor. She doesn't have X-ray vision, AFAIK.

But she is the daughter of Vadar and has the force too. And she felt nothing. Not even hearing the screams of her compatriots just the other side of the door.

But yeah, over analyzing shit isn't good for you.

[JBC]

Isn't the dark side supposed to be pretty hard to detect even for trained Jedi?

[GaijinPunch]

But she is the daughter of Vadar and has the force too. And she felt nothing. Not even hearing the screams of her compatriots just the other side of the door.

I guess I forgot about all those times she used the force in episodes IV, V, and VI that never happened.

[WelshMegalodon]

But she is the daughter of Vadar and has the force too. And she felt nothing. Not even hearing the screams of her compatriots just the other side of the door.

When the original film was being made, Lucas did not consider Leia to be Vader's daughter. Nor did he intend for Luke and Leia to be siblings. I haven't seen Rogue One and don't intend to, but this would be in line with what was established about Leia prior to Empire.

[Skykid]

Yeah, I'm surprised Skykid agrees with that. Particularly:

it's also the only one with a reasonably decent adversary

Who? As far as I remember, Maul is a ghost who says and does literally nothing the entire movie and only shows up for a sword fight at the end.

That's true, he's a non-entity - but that still doesn't stop him being the only interesting original adversary the prequels actually shat out, even if based on pure aesthetics. Count Dooku was uninspired and dull, and Palpatine was one we all knew about and at no point did he ever feel vaguely formidable.

We can agree Maul was a good character massively underused, but a good character nonetheless.

I can't disagree with the podrace or Liam Neeson, but the rest of the pro's are just aesthetics that don't assuage the sheer mind boggling nonsense of its wannabe-political soap opera and complete absence of a protagonist or plot arc. It doesn't have the sheer embarrassment of 2, but at least I had a vague idea of who was fighting who and why in that one. I think EP1 is highest on the "wtf did I just watch" scale, personally.

It's basically fucking garbage, but Opus's suggestion it being the only one that functions in a real movie format - despite being a narrative mess - is correct. The sequels are just CG painting with some people shoehorned in. They're so out there it's borderline modern art.

[Opus131]

Palpatine was actually insulting since the emperor was so damn menacing in the original (and let's not forget how he basically deals with Luke as if he was an insignificant insect and that's after Luke had just beaten Vader. That was actually pretty terrifying). Return of the Jedi was the crappy one out of the three but everything involving Luke, Vader and the emperor was awesome. In the prequels the emperor comes out as almost comical by comparison, like a parody almost.

And Yoda wielding a lightsaber and jumping around like a cartoon character. Just... why.

[gbaplayer]

Office Christmas Party

Not so funny...

[Zen]

Blair Witch (2016) Adam Wingard

Really, at this point I think I am just abusing myself in the hopes of going cold turkey on all new films in general

[JBC]

I thought the new Blair Witch was pretty cool myself. It has great atmosphere & sound design. I don't remember hating any of the characters, which is pretty surprising for a horror movie these days.

It's no Poltergeist or Hellraiser but it's better than what the horror community has been getting. I feel like the last great horror movie was The Descent

[GaijinPunch]

I'm not a fan of these reboots (almost always) to say the least. But I can't think if one that really, REALLY should be left as-is, and I'm not even a huge fan of the first. (Saw it once, enjoyed it).

[Vexorg]

A few movies over the long weekend:

National Treasure: **
Overly long, pretentious, and a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the whole Da Vinci Code craze at the time. Consists mostly of Nicholas Cage standing around looking dumbfounded.


Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000 version): **
Decidedly average action flick. Consists mostly of Nicholas Cage driving around looking dumbfounded.

Splash: ***
Eighties Rom-Com about a mermaid (Darryl Hannah) falling in love with Tom Hanks, which occasionally goes off into the weeds with some "wacky" characters (including John Candy playing John Candy) that seem like they'd be more at home in a Savage Steve Holland film. And somehow, in spite of that, still earned an Oscar nomination for writing. Probably gets a few extra points with the male demographic for Darryl Hannah.

[GaijinPunch]

Took a sick day today, which I rarely do. Japanese double feature.

Dare mo Shiranai [Nobody Knows] (2004)
After having watched Umi Yori Mada Fukaku (After the Storm) and enjoying it, I went back to this. 4 kids are left to fend for themselves in a Tokyo apartment while the worst mother in the world goes off to do God knows what. She actually sends cash after not having seen them for months. A disclaimer at the start says it uses the motif of a case in Tokyo, but that the characters are fictional. Checking up on the original case, I'd say the disclaimer was way more honest than you'd get in the west. The film is quite similar but far less grim. Read the Wikipedia for some seriously fucked up shit. There is more information in the Japanese Wikipedia page, but the juicy parts are all there. A relatively easy watch compared to the next one.

Fukushuu Ha Ware Ni Ari [Vengeance is Mine] (1979)
Definitely never seen a narrative like this. We thought anti-heroes were a product of modern times, but this is from 1979, and is basically just the story of this mother fucker killing people. Maybe anti-hero is a strong word, but there is little rhyme or reason to the the violence. On that note, this film has it all: Murder, hookers, woman slapping, and even some rapey stuff. Pretty long, and the subtitle file was oh so necessary. Super thick accents (regional and cinematic) made some bits a bit hard to follow.

[BIL]

Can't remember Vengeance is Mine too specifically, barring certain scenes, but it did leave an impression. Nasty and nihilistic, as I prefer my more grounded atrocity exhibitions. edit: grounded indeed, I'd totally forgotten it was based on a real-life asshole.

Rewatched City of the Living Dead last night, been an uncharitable decade or so. Oh heck no, the priest hanged himself and the dead will take control unless hot Fulci regular (Catriona McColl) and creepy daytime talkshow host (???) do a thing. Oh Lucio Fulci. As usual, enduring an uneven pace, uninteresting story and slasher-dumb characters netted a couple of indelibly grotesque sequences, a cool soundtrack, and the stubbornly alluring off-kilter mood that keeps me returning to this guy.

Best scene: late at night in creepy house, an old woman's corpse inexplicably appears on the kitchen floor before vanishing without trace. I'd be out the door like a motherfucker, personally.

Best line: immediately afterward, "Calm down! We'll be okay. We're going to search every room in this place and figure out what's going on." I LITERALLY LOLLED. And here I thought Burn After Reading's send-up of the classic "GTFO THE HOUSE NOW YOU STUPID FUCKS" was funny!

[iconoclast]

Re: Vengance is Mine, I like how they didn't compromise on the fact that the main character is a psychopath, but at the same time, that made it hard to enjoy. Still a good movie though, just not one of my favorites.

[BIL]

I'm left with a similar feeling. Effective movie, but that very effectiveness makes me loathe to rewatch. More fantastical, escapist fiction, I can revisit and re-evaluate indefinitely. Stuff that reflects the ugliness of the real world is more like a case report - if it leaves a mark, as far as I'm concerned it's done its job. If it involves real people/events, I'll probably want to read up on them instead. Foxcatcher was like that for me, more recently. I think real horror comes standard for the human experience. We're marinating in it, at best. 3;

Speaking of the fantastical, lord I wish the Alien series hadn't turned into Angry Bee Boss: The Movie. We have bees and bears IRL. Bees the size of bears aren't particularly interesting. Pottering about in largely morbid anticipation of the upcoming movie, I was reminded of a certain beloved deleted scene. Spoilers, watch out chaps! :O Now this is the stuff of outer-space nightmares. A pit of inexplicable yet unmistakable defilement. Needed a queen and insect bureaucracy plonked in there like the titular abberation of Carpenter's The Thing needed a selection of snarky one-liners. Bear-sized bees are so fucking dull after a while, then they went and made like six movies about them. 3:

And Prometheus's big spin was...

Spoiler

A FUCKIN BEE WITH MR. ED TEETH :O

Honestly, would have been an interesting take if the franchise didn't become entirely about the Xenomorph's themselves but branched off into an entire H.R Giger universe of bio-mechanical horror. I mean, "Alien" or "Aliens" could refer to more than just Xenos.

^^^ this, FFS. (thread)

[Opus131]

Aliens was essentially a remake of Them!. Great movie in it's own right but Cameron had obviously no interest in maintaining the mystique of the creature.

[Mischief Maker]

Speaking of the fantastical, lord I wish the Alien series hadn't turned into Angry Bee Boss: The Movie. We have bees and bears IRL. Bees the size of bears aren't particularly interesting. Pottering about in largely morbid anticipation of the upcoming movie, I was reminded of a certain beloved deleted scene. Spoilers, watch out chaps! :O Now this is the stuff of outer-space nightmares. A pit of inexplicable yet unmistakable defilement. Needed a queen and insect bureaucracy plonked in there like the titular abberation of Carpenter's The Thing needed a selection of snarky one-liners. Bear-sized bees are so fucking dull after a while, then they went and made like six movies about them. 3:

Agree 1000%. Here's an idea, remove the one dumb idea from the script (Ripley returns to the ship and tries to deactivate the self-destruct so she can save the goddamn cat) and instead give as an excuse for Ripley to go back that she has to finish the job Parker and Lambert were doing before the Alien got them. Then put this scene back to make the movie scarier and underline the title.

[emphatic]

Trolls (2016). 4/5

Loved it, made me happy.

[GaijinPunch]

I'm left with a similar feeling. Effective movie, but that very effectiveness makes me loathe to rewatch. More fantastical, escapist fiction, I can revisit and re-evaluate indefinitely. Stuff that reflects the ugliness of the real world is more like a case report - if it leaves a mark, as far as I'm concerned it's done its job. If it involves real people/events, I'll probably want to read up on them instead. Foxcatcher was like that for me, more recently. I think real horror comes standard for the human experience. We're marinating in it, at best. 3;

Well said, and that's exactly what I thought. It's got a 7.9 or so on IMDB. As it got near the end, I thought to myself, "good flick... no way I'm ever watching this again though".

[Vexorg]

What About Bob?: ****

Classic slow burn comedy where Bill Murray plays Bob Wiley, a codependent basket case mental patient and Richard Dreyfuss brilliantly plays an egotistical psychiatrist who slowly goes insane when Bob tracks him down to his vacation home in New Hampshire and ruins his life by basically befriending his family and the town's residents and generally being a nice person. I'm not a huge Bill Murray fan, but this is one of his better performances, and even though Richard Dreyfuss isn't much of one for comedy he plays the part of a barely-holding-it-together narcissist finally going off the rails pretty well, This is one of those movies we have to rewatch every so often.

[Aleksei]

I was recently trying to find a movie in the same general area of acting, where the characters are acting crazy or think they're not; I've found it.

The Girl on the Train

I recommend it. It made me , , and

[Ixmucane2]

Passengers

A trite love story (she leaves him because of a big secret, but overcoming a little adversity together makes her love him again), but in space and without much comedy.
Jim the mechanic, one of the 5000 hibernated passengers of a colony ship, wakes up 90 years before arrival. Feeling lonely, after extensive background checks, I mean, after falling in love with her video recordings, he awakens Aurora (a sleeping beauty, i mean, writer from New York). When the robot bartender reveals her awakening wasn't an accident she leaves him.
Meanwhile, the spaceship is in trouble; repairing it will turn the sophisticated city girl into an expert astronaut in love with her Jim.

Going beyond mere predictability and achieving a thoroughly obvious plot is relatively common; the most disgusting aspects are the brutal disregard for the laws of physics, architecture and engineering, and common sense, refusing technical solutions to technical problems and doing something stupid and emotive instead, and obvious lack of creativity.

• There's a long scene with a discussion about the social and economical aspects of space colonization. Since the conflicts are strictly Jim vs. Aurora and people vs. hardware and software failures, it is completely useless (unlike e.g. the discussion of Federation economy in Star Trek: First Contact) and included only because it made the writers look clever.
• Another "clever" idea: near the end the "autodoc" in the infirmary is discovered to be able to hibernate one person (not both). Many couples would choose to sleep 45 years each and reach the colony world old, healthy and together, but first Jim feels guilty enough to let Aurora sleep for the whole trip and then they forget about it.
• Things I wouldn't like on my ship: a fusion reactor that doesn't turn off when its control computer dies.
• Things I wouldn't like on my ship: a swimming pool with just a big, curved glass window between thousands of tons of water and space. Apparently, radiation shielding is for losers and asteroid fields deserve a sporting chance.
• Things I wouldn't like on my ship: a fusion reactor that needs to be "vented" through an airlock as part of the restart procedure.
• Things I wouldn't like on my ship: arranging the hibernation "coffins" in flower-like pods, with ample space between them and between pods, in well-lit halls with a majestic high ceiling.
• Things I wouldn't like on my ship: a fusion reactor that can overheat its own control room, because the control room is one glass pane away from a big donut of completely unshielded plasma (magnets are boring).
• The ship spins around its axis to produce artificial gravity, but when "gravity" systems fail it suddenly stops spinning.

[GaijinPunch]

It looks like high dollar garbage from the previews... and sounds like it delivered.

[iconoclast]

Sadako vs. Kayako
It might be lazy to call this Japan's Freddy vs. Jason... but that's what it is. This has two stories running simultaneously, one that's about Ringu's cursed videotape, and the other that's about the cursed house from Ju-on, before they eventually intertwine. This was better than I expected. I forgot that Koji Shiraishi directed this until they introduced a character that was straight out of one of his earlier films (Cult). He's one of my favorite horror directors, so it's no wonder I enjoyed this. There's a nice PV for the film's theme song, too.

[Ed Oscuro]

The 39 Steps ('35)

Slow paced, some good scenes, some silly plotting foiled by brilliant directing and more than passable acting. The first instance of Hitch abusing cold blondes onscreen.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah, that one is great. Hitchcock rules.

[MintyTheCat]

I watched Thief with James Caan. It was pretty good with a nice and gritty feeling. Caan plays a fairly standard toughie role and by he end of the film sorts the bossman out in dramatic fashion.

I also watched The French Connection parts one and two. I had seen the first one eons back but never the second one. The first one is a bit better I felt.

I have really been into films from the 70s as of late.

[neorichieb1971]

The Hunt for Red October -

A 90's take on a fictional 80's event that never happened involving a Russian Soviet built Stealth Sonar "Caterpillar" propelled engined Typhoon Submarine, Captained by Sean Connery and Sam Neil. The movie tends to lean on politics rather than action, but the nail biting duration of this movie puts it a cut above the rest. If you bite your nails, it must be good.

Some Special effects are a bit dated and there is definitely some iffy camera work in places. I can imagine what it would have been like lugging huge cameras over a submarine which is out to sea with blistering winds (It looks like a few shots used real navy hardware).

John McTiernan directed this, and rarely does anyone mention his name with this film. However, I've not seen this film being mentioned since the 90's. If you haven't seen it, go watch it.

9/10.

[Xyga]

^ I like that movie too, though on the sub's propulsion technology part the interesting thing I've learned later is that it might not be as much sci-fi as it looks, something called 'MHD' (magnetohydrodynamics) that in theory could apply to many other fields and for which research supposedly has stopped...or is actually a thing and so effective that it's been held in absolute secrecy for decades from all countries that could somehow afford it.
If you read about it and what it could possibly do it's quite stunning and scary.