Movies you've just watched

[Xyga]

I don't know maybe it's time to make Alien movies without any humans at all.

2 hours of *shhhhh* *hhhfff* *kweeweooo* and drool (directed by Woody Alien)

[Skykid]

I think a dialogue free Alien movie is a terrific idea!

Who Watches the Birds: Space Above & Beyond.

[Mischief Maker]

Can you think of any yesteryear reboot or remake bar Planet of the Apes that hasn't been a complete shambles or thereabouts?

Dredd.

[BIL]

If you have not already seen it The Ghoul (2016) - Gareth Tunley might be of interest. Director is a Mate of Ben Wheatley, who is executive producer on this one. Dark and complex script.

Cheers, watching that one pronto! I need to catch up with Wheatley.

[Skykid]

Can you think of any yesteryear reboot or remake bar Planet of the Apes that hasn't been a complete shambles or thereabouts?

Dredd.

And others. I can't recall them all. Just generally speaking it's been mostly awful for a long time.

[Stevens]

I think a dialogue free Alien movie is a terrific idea!

The last 17 minutes of Alien sans dialogue are terrifying and amazing all at the same time.

[GaijinPunch]

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

American.

[neorichieb1971]

Guardians of the Galaxy vol2

A bit flatter on blu ray than it was at the cinema. Baby Groot, Rocket and Drax saved the day I think.


Nikita - Luc Besson

Another director who had many hits in his early years, totally ignorant to what actually made them worth watching, hence lots of his recent work. Love Nikita, its actually gritty and nail biting and charming all at the same time.

Other directors that fall into this "early stuff is great, later stuff is shit" category -

The Wachowski brothers
George Lucas
Steven Spielberg
Ridley Scott
John Woo (The killer is great, but it always cracked me up a hitman kills 200 people and there isn't any corneas available for donation).

I wouldn't say that all their recent works is bad, but its definitely worst from a % standpoint.

[wgogh]

The Wachowski did anything good other than the first Matrix film (that its not even THAT great)?

Agree with the others, except the only John Woo film ive watched was Blackjack and I was too young to remember or know if it was any good.

[Mischief Maker]

The Wachowski did anything good other than the first Matrix film (that its not even THAT great)?

"Bound" is pretty good. Come for the lesbians, stay for the Film Noir suspense.

[Zen]

http://observer.com/2017/09/darren-aron ... -the-year/
Holy fuck!

[Skykid]

http://observer.com/2017/09/darren-aron ... -the-year/
Holy fuck!

I sense a slight negative bias in the opening paragraph.

"From the idiotic drug-addict hokum Requiem for a Dream to the overrated, overwrought and over-hyped Black Swan, which I called “a lavishly staged Repulsion in toe shoes,” the films of wack job Darren Aronofsky..."

Requiem and Black Swan are both very good films. I'm sure this will be equally interesting.

[Zen]

I sense a slight negative bias in the opening paragraph.

Oh, absolutely!
Indeed, it was Reeds unabashed "fuck you, your girlfriend and your shitty film, Aronofsky", that I found both amusing and refreshing.

I have not seen Black Swan as it did not interest me but the bit of young Aronofsky - U.N contest winning trivia that accompanied 2014's maligned Noah (a film which I actually found quite interesting) gave me pause in my perception of the golden boy.

I predict Mother! (2017) will be a turd. Although (questions about who is directing who on set, aside), if Hollywoods cock magnet du jour keeps farting out her yap, it may yet be a topical and interesting one.

[xxx1993]

American Assassin is pretty much anything you'd expect from your typical action thriller. And I like it.

[Ixmucane2]

Cars 3

The fundamental absurdities of the premise of a world of cars are deliberately played with and brought to fairly tragic proportions. Why are younger generations of cars more technologically advanced than their parents? Doesn't anybody receive upgrades? What does gender mean for the clearly male and female cars? Can they have some kind of intimacy? Are cars reproducing sexually? If not, who builds them? Why do their shapes suggest humans exist and are meant to be their passengers? (Non-spoiler: one of the new characters is a school bus, and not one for junior cars.)
Facing these issues rather than pretending they aren't issues would have been better, but it's still a moving and coherent story with a very appropriate ending.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Ashes of Time Redux - someone, whose opinions I tend to value greatly, was full of praise for certain other Wong Kar-wai film, but this is the one that grew on me slowly as I watched. One that rewards patience, gave me a very unusual feeling of not wanting it to end. I wanted it to stay, as if no other watching could ever be the same.

This Redux DVD version I've got does come as a flawed masterpiece. Extensive image post-processing looks tacky and the translation isn't great. Especially the latter stings, coming from such a literary film (yes, I do have a problem with off-screen narration in general, but this one wouldn't fly without it, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, then not much else that I had seen). I nevertheless find cropping its image a stroke of genius. The film just is about so much more than looking nice that I'm inclined to believe Wong Kar-wai didn't want it to look like yet another wuxia film, which it is anything but. This "closing in" perspective is nearly iconoclastic, as is almost everything else here. So its characters live by the sword, but this is about as "chanson de geste" as it gets.

A word for the wise? Have patience when watching it, or just you have some faith.

[iconoclast]

Been watching some capeshit since I bought the new Marvel vs Capcom. I hadn't seen a superhero movie since Batman TDK, which I didn't think was any good, so I figured I was done with this stuff. But the Marvel movies are pretty entertaining for what they are. Maybe Batman was just bad.

Guardians 1 & 2 > Captain America Winter Soldier > Avengers 1 & 2. I liked them all though. Guardians strikes me as Star Wars but totally superior. I'll check out Antman and Doctor Strange next.

[GaijinPunch]

"Bound" is pretty good. Come for the lesbians, stay for the Film Noir suspense.

I always come for the lesbians.

[NYN]

Saw Kiru (Kill!) again.
Plain fun. Humor is all over it and with it, it mocks the genre. The mighty samurai class is depicted either scheming and obidient or passionate and foolish. Center are a ronin claiming to be yakuza and a peasant who bought daisho to climb up in the world. Elegant framing of faces. Chock-full of fast action. Nakadai with a goofy performance. Cool cutting.
Makes me wanna see more Okamoto.

The Age of Assassins sounds so funny. Has anyone seen it?

[Stevens]

What Happened to Monday

Interesting little thriller about a set of septuplets forced to live as one person.

I thought the final scene was kind of lame, but overall it was a nice unexpected surprise.

[Xyga]

Apocalypse Now

hadn't touched it in maybe 20 years, well it didn't lose much of its power, that film is plutonium

Spoiler

[soprano1]

Sausage Party (2016)
What could be an interesting idea turned out to be a shitfest. I'm going to watch Kung Pow to take this horrible taste in my mouth.

[Vexorg]

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword: **

A big-budget flop (some estimates put this one losing as much as $150 million, which would put it near the top of the biggest money losing films of all time) of a film that turns the classic Arthurian legend into a confusing Guy Ritchie mess. Loaded with the usual Guy Richie tropes (half a zillion jump cuts for everything, Sherlock Holmes-like overexplaining, important plot points reduced to montages while completely inconsequential events are dissected in great detail, etc.) the result is a film that feels like it would need about three or four viewings to figure everything out, but nobody in their right mind would bother watching it more than once (and even that's pushing it.) Jude law mails in a forgettable performance as the badguy, and a cast of interchangeable B-listers serve mostly to give the audience something to look at in between overwrought CGI sequences that feel like they came straight from the Lord of the Rings cutting room floor.

There's worse films out there (see also: that Wrath of the Titans trainwreck from a few years ago) but this one can be safely passed on.

[soprano1]

Logan (2017)
Depressing and brownish overall, but it's biggest fault is that it is too damn long.

[Kaiser]

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword: **
Loaded with the usual Guy Richie tropes (half a zillion jump cuts for everything, Sherlock Holmes-like overexplaining, important plot points reduced to montages while completely inconsequential events are dissected in great detail, etc.) the result is a film that feels like it would need about three or four viewings to figure everything out, but nobody in their right mind would bother watching it more than once (and even that's pushing it.) J

Especially when you can watch a much better movie called Excalibur and figure out everything on the first watch.

[BryanM]

I don't know maybe it's time to make Alien movies without any humans at all.

Couldn't be any worse.

The concepts they've been using is like the dog that returns to its own vomit; we already have Alien and Aliens. Anything else in the same vein would be redundant at best, or inferior at worse. Whenever I keep going on about how being first is almost the only thing that matters, this is one of the reasons why. How many goddamn different ways can you retell King Arthur? I think we've got it, and are good on that front, thanks.

That is what art is supposed to be about - making something new or different from what came before. Myself, I'm of the opinion that something like Zombieland is more in tune with the modern audience - as we've grown up with zombies and moved on from the simple basics, so has it.

My personal xenophobic alien slasher movie of choice here in 2017 would be about a guy who works as a space mercenary, that works as a guard for various groups of planetary colonists. At first he is young and naive, but quickly becomes jaded as the various types of aliens he runs into doing his job over the years turn out to be universally murderous.

As jaded as the audience is. Isn't Nightmare on Elm Street a comedy by this point? Normalization, man.

Anyway, that's all imaginary internet webnovels at the end of the day. From Hollywood, copy and paste and "David is a dick" is all we're gonna get.

[Skykid]

Logan (2017)
Depressing and brownish overall, but it's biggest fault is that it is too damn long.

Yeah. Like most of the best-received Marvel movies, this one's worth was blown way out of proportion. I didn't think it was bad - on the contrary, better than most of its ilk - but it was overly gloomy, anti-climatic and left you feeling empty handed and low after stringing everything out for far too long.

I respect arresting violence in movies when applied in tonal sync with everything else that's going on. When the critics get all wet because they saw some blood flying in a superhero movie, they fail to measure whether the movie is carried by its controversial elements alone; unlike something like Django Unchained, which marries cartoonish and cathartic ultra-violence with serious subject matter absolutely pitch perfectly.

[Zen]

You would rate Django, Skykid?

[soprano1]

left you feeling empty handed and low after stringing everything out for far too long.

Yeah, pretty much. I felt surprised on how they treated Xavier.

Spoiler

Yeah, let's bury the old man on the side of the road, he's just the motherfucking Professor X

The best adaptation of the X-Men is still, imo, the 90's Animated series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAkL2-vh2Sk

Bonus video, the new openings they made for the Japanese dub:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rSw4Xl5qfs

[NYN]

Yeah, pretty much. I felt surprised on how they treated Xavier.

Spoiler

Yeah, let's bury the old man on the side of the road, he's just the motherfucking Professor X

Spoiler

Yeah, and you know what? Let's put the protagonist in the ground, only in short walking distance to his country of birth. X marks the spot, baby. Unbelievable!

Honestly, I was rather surprised about the parallels to the Dark Angel series pilot.

Spoiler

Children. Military. Chase through the woods.