Movies you've just watched

[DMC]

I watched Confessions yesterday.

A teacher who lost her daughter is confronting her class--suspecting that some of them killed her daughter. What follows are a lot of confessions from both the students and their parents.



It's a great movie if you want to see spoiled kids repeatedly drop things in slow motion while the same Radiohead piece is playing again and again.

Shame because there seems to be a good screenplay underneath, and the actors did a pretty good job as well. But I doubt I have ever watched a movie overusing slow downs as much as this one. And I really despised the soundtrack. It really was telling us what to feel rather than just showing the drama. Overly dramatic piano piece, some singer/song-writer guy playing an emo acoustic guitar melody while singing in falsetto, and then some menacing Boris track when going for a predictable shock effect. And the soundtrack would just never stop.

[GaijinPunch]

My first long haul flight in a while.

Nobody
Good fun, but maybe they could have made the story elements a bit fuller.

A Quiet Place Part II
Good airplane flick. Again, the use of sound was very interesting, and it would have to be. Suspense pretty high but nothing I'd repeat.

Friday
Poured one out for Ezal. Never gets old... I think the best part of this is that Ice Cube is not even close to the best part of it, although he does fine as a young man faced with some tough choices, and rather bad influences all around him. Really torn on Last Friday. Surely there's no way they can make it worth a shit, right?

[xxx1993]

The Guilty was one of Antoine Fuqua's weakest ones.

[xxx1993]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage was really fun! Even better than the first!

[lilmanjs]

Throw Down
Johnnie To showcases wild fantasy and no good wastes of space in an epic about Judo fighters, gangs, and a failing nightclub. This movie movies at a quick pace, and has some pretty dreamlike sequences in it. I'm glad this is one of the few restorations Fortune Star has paid for that didn't get smothered in that awful yellow tint.

Really like that film. Love some of his films and Throw Down is definitely an highlight.
Sad to know some of their restorations aren't up the par. Sometimes the materials don't help as well. In other cases and if the Director is still alive.. they might be responsible for the new color choices and direction...

Sent from my EML-L29 using Tapatalk

The problem wouldn't be so bad if it was contained to say one director, but its on a lot of different stuff from Police Story 3: Supercop to A Better Tomorrow and beyond. Such a shame, but I'm glad Criterion picked this up for release. Throw Down is quite a delight.

[cj iwakura]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage was really fun! Even better than the first!

It doubles down on Venom/Eddie shenanigans, which really was the best thing about the original, but I feel like they dropped the ball on Carnage a bit. He's terrifying, but he has so little he gets to do, especially in a PG-13 film. I kept waiting for him to cut someone, anyone in half.

Absolutely lost my mind at the post-credit stinger, though.

[xxx1993]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage was really fun! Even better than the first!

It doubles down on Venom/Eddie shenanigans, which really was the best thing about the original, but I feel like they dropped the ball on Carnage a bit. He's terrifying, but he has so little he gets to do, especially in a PG-13 film. I kept waiting for him to cut someone, anyone in half.

Absolutely lost my mind at the post-credit stinger, though.

At least the final battle in the church was really epic.

[cj iwakura]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage was really fun! Even better than the first!

It doubles down on Venom/Eddie shenanigans, which really was the best thing about the original, but I feel like they dropped the ball on Carnage a bit. He's terrifying, but he has so little he gets to do, especially in a PG-13 film. I kept waiting for him to cut someone, anyone in half.

Absolutely lost my mind at the post-credit stinger, though.

At least the final battle in the church was really epic.

The sound designer deserves mad props for how they made Harrelson sound as Carnage(if that was him doing the voice), especially that roar when he first appears.

[xxx1993]

Not to mention he drops the title of the movie during the final battle.

[Herr Schatten]

Blood Red Sky (2021).

I'm a huge fan of director Peter Thorwarth's previous works, so I was keen to check out how his first international production would turn out, even more so because he jumped genre from comedy to horror.

The result is quite decent. The first half of the movie is really good, with interesting characters and mostly above-average actors playing them. The premise of the story is quite original, even though, this being a genre flick, it's probably impossible to avoid having traces that remind of other movies (From Dusk Till Dawn and Train To Busan in particular). One aspect that's actually quite excellent is the creature and make up design. How the transformed become looking more beastly and less human the more they feast on blood is a sight to behold.

What's less good is that the movie has a tendency to over-explain things. Neither the hijacker's deeper motivation nor the background of the main character actually needed explaining, and the flashbacks that explore the latter break the pacing of the movie. Also less than stellar, probably due to lack of budget, are the fight scenes, which consist of a lot of shaky camera capturing dimly-lit movement. Since there are increasingly more of these scenes as the movie progresses, its whole second half suffers.

Overall, though, I pretty much enjoyed it and give it a solid 7.5/10.

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Kate - Thought this was really good. Surprised to see a movie that is this well done debut on Netflix. Feels like you’re watching a big budget new action movie. Plenty of cool scenes. A must for fans of John Wick type stuff.

Boogie Nights - Haven’t seen this since it got released. It perfectly captures what the porn scene was probably like in the 70’s. I like the end of the movie and how gritty the depiction of the aftermath of living that kind of lifestyle has.

The Descent - I thought this was going to be lame at the beginning. Just a bunch of women blabbing about dumb crap. Was setting myself up for the disappointment and then this movie turned into one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in a while. Just one terrible thing happens after the next. Ending was great too. I really like how they kind of ripped off the first Texas Chainsaw massacre ending.

[Mischief Maker]

The Many Saints of Newark

It's fine, it's about as you'd expect, and it's absolutely not for people who haven't seen the show.

Anything more would be a spoiler.

Spoiler

Typical Uncle Jun.

[BIL]

Ohshi, it's out? Cheers bud, appreciate the spoiler tag. I'll lamb chop it from the thread until watching.

[Mischief Maker]

I dumped Netflix for HBO Max.

Less quantity of shows, higher quality.

Many Saints is only on during October, tho.

[BIL]

Good stuff. Gracefully walks the line between old and new. Tone is dead-on to the show, sensitively observed and punishingly dark, with an easy knack for the ethereal. Very much has its own story, well-told, but it'll undeniably work best as an addendum to the show's 80hr film. That's exactly what I wanted, tbh.

I'd be up for another, assuming Chase remains in absolute control.

Spoiler

Typical Uncle Jun.

Spoilers:

Spoiler

Yeah, that was pitch-perfect. Hell hath no fury like Uncle Jun slighted!

Silvio's 60s hair, brutal. D:

Liked the sparing nods to the supernatural via Chris. In the show's best tradition, just enough to ground it in slightly Lynchier territory than the typical mafia story.

Interested to see a few retcons. In the show, Tony's dad cheerfully makes it home in time for dinner, after the amusement park bust. Dickie doesn't seem to show any signs of drug addiction, either. I'd wonder if Chris's talk of him being a junkie was just hearsay, but the first seems a pretty big detail for Tony to remember wrong. Either way, I liked what they did on both counts. It was nice seeing Johnny in slightly darker context than his salad days show incarnation, and Dickie had more than enough vices without heading down that route.

Johnny Boy's "...What thing?" near the end surprised me, before I remembered the show never implied he had any designs on Tony following him into the underworld. This is the sort of thing that makes me game for another film, again assuming Chase helms it.

Now to enjoy the Sopranos community flamewars

[Mischief Maker]

Spoiler

Tony's dad could make bail the day of the arrest and still go to trial and get sentenced a while later.

[BIL]

Yeah, very true. Although

Spoiler

this aside made me think they'd just changed how things went down:





Maybe to make Dickie more of a factor in Tony's adolescence, and also to increase tensions with Junior.

Then again, with all the shit going down in Newark, maybe he just got sprung for logistical reasons before they collared him again. Or he could've posted something as collateral, only for it to fall through / be bullshit, Johnny being who he is.

Ohshi - I just remembered, I'm a huge fuckin nerd I do think they took some liberty, since in the show Tony tells Melfi his dad got pinched for a parole violation, his having been in prison when Tony was even younger.





It doesn't matter really. The show's done stuff like this before (Silvio being a mob associate in the pilot, Tony's right-hand man in the series; the pork store going by a different name in the same; probably more I forget) - plus, it genuinely has some leeway, with everything we see re: Johnny Boy being from Tony's distant memory.

[xxx1993]

Just saw No Time to Die. And well… It was fine. But that ending…

Spoiler

James Bond is dead.

[BIL]

Blood Red Sky (2021)

Hadn't heard of this - I have an irrational fondness for "Plague On A Plane/Train" horror (cf Busan and Quarantine 2: Terminal, the actually pretty decent sequel to the mediocre US remake of REC), so I gave it a go. Quite good! Has a bit of Die Hard flair in its ruthless villains, resourceful protagonist and unpredictably escalating threat. I'm not surprised to hear the director's background is in comedy, a few sequences had a distinct air of black farce. Could've definitely used a little trimming down, but it's always good to see unashamed B-horror done well.

[Stevens]

The Descent - I thought this was going to be lame at the beginning. Just a bunch of women blabbing about dumb crap. Was setting myself up for the disappointment and then this movie turned into one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in a while. Just one terrible thing happens after the next. Ending was great too. I really like how they kind of ripped off the first Texas Chainsaw massacre ending.

Saw this in the theater when it was released. Rarely a year goes by that I don't go back to it. Absolutely masterful horror (and you'll pick things up in the shadows upon viewing again) that stands toe to toe with the genres kings.

In my top two with Alien. No joke.

[Dochartaigh]

Throw Down
Johnnie To showcases wild fantasy and no good wastes of space in an epic about Judo fighters, gangs, and a failing nightclub. This movie movies at a quick pace, and has some pretty dreamlike sequences in it. I'm glad this is one of the few restorations Fortune Star has paid for that didn't get smothered in that awful yellow tint.

I never really post in this topic... although I do sometimes give it a quick read for something to watch... but I just had to come here to say how absolutely horrible this movie is. Like so horrible I actually deleted it from my digital library (and there's 2,000+ movies there, and trust me, not all are good, like at all lol). It's so awful I'm still having a problem rationalizing to myself why I even finished the movie...

The ENTIRE first hour literally nothing of consequence happens – it's a bore (besides a ~3 minute fight scene...). Actually, things do happen, kinda, but you have absolutely NO CLUE what the hell is going on. No plot points are ever explained until it's too late and you no longer care about them because you're still pissed it took this long to get any sort of super small, backward, explanation for something you now no longer care about. ZERO STARS (and go and read the other bad reviews of this movie, but far and wide I am NOT the only one who didn't understand what was happening... and I watch foreign and subtitled movies all the time fyi... it's just horrible bad execution and plot development on this one plain and simple).

The Many Saints of Newark

It's fine, it's about as you'd expect, and it's absolutely not for people who haven't seen the show.

Anything more would be a spoiler.

This one is also another crap fest – even for hardcore diehard fans of the show. Right from the start it's a complete fail. I think the director was like "how can I introduce ~10+ people in the first 15 minutes, who look VAGUELY like their 30+ year older selves in the original series, and then have the audience remember who each and every person is for the duration of the entire movie based on those ~2-3 second intros...".

Also a HUGE disappointment seeing how the entire hype was about how the Tony-in-real-lifes' son is playing him in this movie... yet the entire first half of the movie Tony is 11/12? years old and played by a younger actor (of course), and for the entire second half Tony's-son-playing-younger-Tony (Michael Gandolfini) had a total of what? Maybe 15 minutes of screen time total? (I wish somebody timed this, it's really SUPER brief). The ENTIRE point of me wanting to watch this so bad was to see Tony as a young hoodlum and how he got his start coming up in the mafia...

Anyway, absolutely totally pointless movie to watch... unless you need even MORE reinforcement after watching the original Sopranos series that all the main mob characters are psychopaths (which even after one watch through of the series I doubt anybody needed that to be reinforced... and I've watched the entire series probably a dozen times... it's my favorite of all time).

[Hoagtech]

Throw Down
Johnnie To showcases wild fantasy and no good wastes of space in an epic about Judo fighters, gangs, and a failing nightclub. This movie movies at a quick pace, and has some pretty dreamlike sequences in it. I'm glad this is one of the few restorations Fortune Star has paid for that didn't get smothered in that awful yellow tint.

I never really post in this topic... although I do sometimes give it a quick read for something to watch... but I just had to come here to say how absolutely horrible this movie is. Like so horrible I actually deleted it from my digital library (and there's 2,000+ movies there, and trust me, not all are good, like at all lol). It's so awful I'm still having a problem rationalizing to myself why I even finished the movie...

The ENTIRE first hour literally nothing of consequence happens – it's a bore (besides a ~3 minute fight scene...). Actually, things do happen, kinda, but you have absolutely NO CLUE what the hell is going on. No plot points are ever explained until it's too late and you no longer care about them because you're still pissed it took this long to get any sort of super small, backward, explanation for something you now no longer care about. ZERO STARS (and go and read the other bad reviews of this movie, but far and wide I am NOT the only one who didn't understand what was happening... and I watch foreign and subtitled movies all the time fyi... it's just horrible bad execution and plot development on this one plain and simple).

The Many Saints of Newark

It's fine, it's about as you'd expect, and it's absolutely not for people who haven't seen the show.

Anything more would be a spoiler.

This one is also another crap fest – even for hardcore diehard fans of the show. Right from the start it's a complete fail. I think the director was like "how can I introduce ~10+ people in the first 15 minutes, who look VAGUELY like their 30+ year older selves in the original series, and then have the audience remember who each and every person is for the duration of the entire movie based on those ~2-3 second intros...".

Also a HUGE disappointment seeing how the entire hype was about how the Tony-in-real-lifes' son is playing him in this movie... yet the entire first half of the movie Tony is 11/12? years old and played by a younger actor (of course), and for the entire second half Tony's-son-playing-younger-Tony (Michael Gandolfini) had a total of what? Maybe 15 minutes of screen time total? (I wish somebody timed this, it's really SUPER brief). The ENTIRE point of me wanting to watch this so bad was to see Tony as a young hoodlum and how he got his start coming up in the mafia...

Anyway, absolutely totally pointless movie to watch... unless you need even MORE reinforcement after watching the original Sopranos series that all the main mob characters are psychopaths (which even after one watch through of the series I doubt anybody needed that to be reinforced... and I've watched the entire series probably a dozen times... it's my favorite of all time).

I agree the Newark didn’t hit the mark compared to the finest mafioso series of all time, but I’m glad it exists as a tribute to the series years later. A couple of highlights were not the plot, but the gritty action violence of the drill bit, drowning the cheating bitch, and that guy that played Silvio I thought nailed the look with the slick back hair and the hunch.

I walked into it full cynical and wasn’t disappointed as much as I thought I would be..

[BIL]

MSON was definitely threadbare on Tony content. I cringed a bit at the trailers and posters hyping him up as some Luciano/Lansky figure, as if he was ever portrayed that way on the show. He was the inadvertent head of that pygmy thing over in Jersey, for a few years, until he crashed the plane with no survivors due to a combination of piggish greed and wilful blindness. After the heir apparent's untimely cancer death catapults him up the pyramid, Tony promptly blunders into war with his elderly mother and uncle, who he told all and sundry was great at giving head. After narrowly evading death for openly shit-talking his boss, because Uncle Jun is a cheap fuck who hired Boyz II Men for the hit, Jun then saved Tony's bacon on a whim, because he was judged a better steward for this thing of theirs than his psycho asshole brother-in-law, who loves selling coke on garbage routes.

After enjoying a period of relative stability and plenty, Tony then murders his best earner in cold blood because he killed a fuckin horse. The underboss of the Lupertazzis then tries to make Tony his fall guy in a takeover plot, something Tony only narrowly wises up to, in yet another bad day for Boyz II Men. Then he finally, irreparably shat the bed and brought the wrath of NYC down on his whole operation, because like a true stone gangster, he let his feefees stop him from putting down his unhinged loose cannon cousins. Great character, mediocre gangster, thoroughly well-documented.

I didn't care ultimately, Tony was too young for any of this stuff to mean much. Ice cream truck heist and a sissy fight with Jackie was about as good as it was gonna get. I'd love a sequel covering The Unrest of '83, though, whatever happened there.

[Mischief Maker]

I liked MSON precisely because it wasn't muppet babies sopranos. It wasn't until I started reading reviews afterward that I realized certain background characters were main show regulars.

It's Dickie Moltisanti's story, not Tony's.

I say it's what The Sopranos would have been if instead of Dr. Melfi, Tony was assigned this guy.

Spoiler

"So much tragedy in your life."

I definitely saw parallels between Dickie giving Tony the rationalization to take the hot speakers and Tony pushing Chris off the wagon.

If anything, it's an origin story for Uncle Junior.

[BIL]

Spoiler

"So much tragedy in your life."

I definitely saw parallels between Dickie giving Tony the rationalization to take the hot speakers and Tony pushing Chris off the wagon.

True to Chase's usual downplaying of mafia lore in favour of schlubby consumerist reality, this was Tony's doom forecast. The movie's most signal image of him was also that of the trailer, blissfully lazing about with his goods. The classic motif of greedy, reckless young guys getting something for what they disastrously convince themselves is "nothing."

(cut to Tony Egg socking Kim in the teeth, no doubt tormented by the same spectres of Mr. and Mrs. Mike Smith that Tony invoked to Carm, after his narrowly defeating Boyz II Men)

There's some notion of filial "honour" at the very end, at casket-side, but where'd that ever lead Tony and co, really? Just more unearned comfort grasped at from an express elevator to the grave or the can. MSON is Tony with one foot in the door... the promotional materials, even if they were 100% genuine and not just marketing dept. cajoling - how much is there to say really? I'd enjoy a sequel in this mode, for sure, but I can fill in the blanks re: Tony and Johnny Boy, Jackie, Pussy et al happily enough. Fuck was Tony gonna do with a semester and a half at Seton Hall? Sell patio furniture?

[Mischief Maker]

Also:

Spoiler

The diner Tony is waiting to meet Dickie at in the end is Holsten's.

[Vexorg]

No Time To Die: **1/2

I've never been a huge fan of Roger Craig as James Bond (I tend to be more a fan of the cheesy Roger Moore ones) but I thought this one was better than Spectre. Plot-wise it's a pretty formulaic Bond film (villain tries to take over and/or destroy the world with some sort of high-tech gobbledygook) and Rami Malek is a pretty average Bond villain. Overall I'd put it in the middle of the 5 Daniel Craig films (my order would probably go Casino Royale, Skyfall, No Time To Die, Spectre, Quantum of Solace.) It's hard to talk about much more than that without spoilers, so...

Spoiler

Apparently if you make the movie long enough, James Bond does, in fact, have time to die. I'm sure there were reasons for taking this approach (most likely it had something to do with Daniel Craig wanting to make sure they wouldn't try to bring him back for another James Bond film) but much like most of the "twist" endings in the Daniel Craig Bond films it feels extraneous and tacked on at the last minute, especially given the fact that MI6's reaction to the loss of James Bond was basically that Jeremy Clarkson "Oh no! Anyway..." meme floating around, which leads me to believe that James Bond is about as dead as Sherlock Holmes was after his encounter with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls (which happened for similar reasons as Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of writing Sherlock Holmes stories but was eventually forced to bring him back after he found out that nobody had much interest in anything he wrote besides Sherlock Holmes.) In pretty much any other circumstance James Bond would have found a way to survive, but apparently someone wanted him dead, and that someone was probably Daniel Craig.

After seeing Spectre I felt that they completely wasted Ernest Blofeld in this version, and this film does little to change that perception. The shadowy organization that was secretly (or not so secretly) behind the evil plots of the last four films was basically thrown under the bus for the sake of a minor plot point early in the film, and eventually Blofeld meets the same fate after putting in a brief cameo. I wasn't a fan of Christoph Waltz's rendition of Blofeld, but the whole thing just felt dumb.

Nomi, the "new" 007 in this movie, seems like a decent addition to the film, although I have a hard time believing she would become the new James Bond (and/or Jane Bond, as the case may be.) Every time another 00 agent appears in a Bond film they always seem to end up either a traitor or dead, so it's interesting to see what happens when there's more than one and they actually stay on the same side. Since Nomi eventually gives the 007 designation back to James it's uncertain if she would get it back after the demise of James Bond, but it would definitely be interesting to see her in another film, even if in a supporting role.

[xxx1993]

Halloween Kills. Certainly felt like the "Empire Strikes Back" of the Halloween movies. The battle may be over, but the war with Michael Myers is only just beginning.

[Vexorg]

Free Guy: **1/2

A somewhat interesting concept (An NPC in a GTA style game becomes self-aware and starts breaking the game) ruined completely by saddling it with a rather stupid out-of-game plot and one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen in a film (Taika Waititi as the villain Antwan who comes across as basically an even more annoying and over-the-top version of Mugatu from the Zoolander movies.) It has a few good moments in it, but not enough that you'd want to see it more than once.

[GaijinPunch]

I saw Dune in IMAX a few weeks ago in Germany. Was nice getting a jump on my US and Japan based friends. My friend who booked the tickets really fucked up... or should I saw was fucked by German intuition. We got 7th row (of 7) far right. Small theater, so we were like, okay, back row ain't bad. Then walked in and realized they count backwards! Why the fuck not?! So, front left corner.

So on that note, I kind of owe Japan an apology as I've always lambasted their website skills for so long. They still suck, really bad from what little J-surfing I still do, but the Germans and Dutch have shown me that it's not unique to Japan. America fucks almost everything up, but in terms of intuitive website design we win.