Movies you've just watched

[GaijinPunch]

I think those who have avoided that spoilerfest trailers should really BvS.

Is this a bring your own verb sentence?

[xxx1993]

I thought Spectre was pretty poor. I concur with the general critical consensus on that one.

I just saw Batman v Superman, I liked it.

That's a surprise. Everyone else seems to think it's garbage of the highest order.

I thought it was pretty good. Don't get why everyone hates it. I also don't understand the hate for Spectre either.

[Skykid]

I think those who have avoided that spoilerfest trailers should really BvS.

Is this a bring your own verb sentence?

[EXEXEX]

I think those who have avoided that spoilerfest trailers should really BvS.

Is this a bring your own verb sentence?

oh my god... Edited

[dingsbums]

(Re)watched a lot of older movies in the last weeks - some for the first time, some to see if they still hold up.

The Frighteners (1996)
When the movie came out I was a huge fan of Peter Jacksons early movies and it seemed to me that Hollywood toned down his humor, style and gore a lot => I couldn't stand this movie at the time when it was released.
Nowadays I like the movie a lot => it's entertaining, perfectly cast (Jeffrey Combs alone is worth watching it) and simply an entertaining movie. It's Peter Jacksons transition movie from his early splatter comedies to Lord of the Rings.

The Black Hole (1982)
This movie frightened me as a kid. Walt Disney would never ever release such a dark kids movie nowadays. Nostalgia aside, this movie is great.

In the Name of the Father (1993)
Watched it for the first time. Daniel Day Lewis gives an outstanding performance - He easily carries the movie alone. Check this movie out.

Enter the Void (2009)
Gasper Noe is one of the few directors that takes the film medium, twist it hard and takes it to the extreme. This movie is no exeption. Like Seul contre tous (1998) and Irreversible (2002) a punch to the stomach, a movie that you love or hate => gladly I belong in the first group .

Once upon a time in America (1984)
What can I say about a classic - if you still have not seen this movie, watch it goddamnit .

Blood & Bones (2004)
It takes a lot to play an asshole convincingly => Takeshi Kitano suceeds easily.

Last Action Hero (1993)
I really like this movie a lot - I don't know what it is but it's simply entertaining. Sure the plot is dumb, the kid is annoying but to me it's in the same league as e.g. Groundhog Day, Mrs Doubtfire, Jumanji => a nice entertaining way to spend 2 hours .

[Vexorg]

I think those who have avoided that spoilerfest trailers should really BvS.

Is this a bring your own verb sentence?

oh my god... Edited

So would you say it's the movie ever?

[GaijinPunch]

Enter the Void (2009)
Gasper Noe is one of the few directors that takes the film medium, twist it hard and takes it to the extreme. This movie is no exeption. Like Seul contre tous (1998) and Irreversible (2002) a punch to the stomach, a movie that you love or hate => gladly I belong in the first group .

Can you believe there's a longer version that runs like 2:45 minutes? Great film. I've yet to watch his other stuff. Working my way up to it. Enter the Void has a special place in my heart, as I lived near the principal shooting for so long. Near = like a mile away. Loved it.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Enter the Void (2009)
Gasper Noe is one of the few directors that takes the film medium, twist it hard and takes it to the extreme. This movie is no exeption. Like Seul contre tous (1998) and Irreversible (2002) a punch to the stomach, a movie that you love or hate => gladly I belong in the first group .

Can you believe there's a longer version that runs like 2:45 minutes? Great film. I've yet to watch his other stuff. Working my way up to it. Enter the Void has a special place in my heart, as I lived near the principal shooting for so long. Near = like a mile away. Loved it.

Saw the long version in an Amsterdam student cinema as part of a double feature with El Topo. Didn't help that I was high as fuck. It's an amazing film, though I can understand how people might not be fond of it; it's endlessly indulging (Noe in general doesn't seem to give a fuck) and just a stressful experience... also, as far as I can see, Paz de la Huerta's only decent performance.

I can't wait to watch Love with the wife...

[GaijinPunch]

I never had the balls to watch Irreversible, although I know I should. Apparently I Stand Alone isn't much better in terms of accessibility. He also well utilized the locale, which I can't imagine was easy for someone not familiar with the terrain. I recognized one shot in my old neighborhood (and by that I mean a residential area, not Shinjuku). Also, the actor that played Alex is a local to Tokyo. Never met him but we have heaps of friends in common. I believe at least one of my friends made it to the penultimate audition, where he (Cyril) won. Take that w/ a grain of salt.

Anywho, yeah... my mom got me the BluRay for my Bday so I should fire it up.

[soprano1]

Re-watched Caddyshack, this time with my sister and her boyfriend, and everyone enjoyed it. One of my favourite comedies ever, Bill Murray was really good here.
Also watched Amadeus, good movie too. I don't know if Mozart laughed like a bloody hyena, though.

[Opus131]

The real Mozart wasn't anything like what you see the movie, but i guess you can argue that what you see in the film is how Salieri perceived things to be, since what we are seeing stems entirely from his point of view. Still, i pity anyone watching this film with the intention of learning anything about Mozart.

Of course, anyone who wants to learn about Mozart should just listen to the music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR-BTznm8VA

[Some-Mist]

Enter the Void (2009)
Gasper Noe is one of the few directors that takes the film medium, twist it hard and takes it to the extreme. This movie is no exeption. Like Seul contre tous (1998) and Irreversible (2002) a punch to the stomach, a movie that you love or hate => gladly I belong in the first group .

not much to add other than this one got me to buy the Tibetan book of the dead after I watched it. found myself oddly fascinated with the content.

[EmperorIng]

Amadeus is a movie I have loved since childhood, even if (even back then) I knew it had scarcely little in common with Mozart's life.

I will say, with confidence, that the movie poster for Amadeus is my all-time favorite movie poster. Nothing else compares.

Spoiler

Nostalgia maybe?

[Skykid]

I never had the balls to watch Irreversible, although I know I should.

It's genuinely horrific and disturbing. A very well directed movie, but unless you're a budding murdering rapist there's not much pleasure to derive from it.



Batman vs Superman

I got invited to this one, meaning it was a freebie, which is the only way on earth I ever would have gone to see it.

It's worth starting out by saying that it's a far superior movie to Man of Steel, which isn't difficult because that movie was one of the worst pieces of shit I had the displeasure of not being allowed to leave the movie theatre for.

Snyder seems very hit and miss as a director. Sadly that's not to say that BvsS is a hit in the quality department, but certainly better than it rightfully should be.

It's well cast in terms of secondary actors. Scoot McNairy, Laurence Fishburne and Holly Hunter are all strong actors and careful choices to fill periphery roles. The Superman guy is a fine fit for Superman, even if he's limited, while Affleck is just Affleck. Aesthetically he didn't make a bad Wayne, but he's as wooden, expressionless and one-dimensional as he is in everything else. The biggest question I was asked is who was better, he or Christian Bale. Considering they're both sort of useless, I don't think I've settled on an answer, but I'll concede Affleck has more inherent personality.

Jessie Eisenberg is starting to annoy me. He's overcast, only ever plays one character, and really isn't very good. Gal Gadot is absolute sex on legs, but christ she's a horrible actor. She only has one substantial string of dialogue in the closing scenes and it's delivered to a laughably bad standard. Amy Adams I'm a bit sick of looking at: she's got a facetious face, if that makes sense - eternally smug. But she isn't as offensive as in Man of Steel owing to less screen time.

But to cut to the heart of it, there are some good elements to the movie. Most surprising was the dialogue not being as insufferably terrible as it was in Man of Steel. While the latter was like being knifed in the ears for two hours, the writing in BvsS is of a higher standard and occasionally even clever. There's certainly a decent movie in there somewhere, but unfortunately it gets smothered by far too much layering.

For the first hour it's actually rather slow, and the better for it. There's relationship and character development and plenty of backstory being filled in. But then it starts to do too much and occasionally errs on incomprehensibility. They start shoeing in the Justice League characters in a really odd way, where they confuse the main storyline by letting you wonder whether these characters are related to this movie or not. Chinese people are complaining that it's totally confusing and they had no idea what was going on until the battling begins - which is probably the most perfunctory aspect of the film. And that's because they don't know what Justice League is and the movie is ham-fisted about introducing what will ultimately turn out to be characters in a new movie.

While the dialogue is surprisingly passable, the plot writing is garbled. It's far too long - by the end I was really feeling it dragging - and developments in the story were really convoluted and didn't properly feed the audience. Luthor's motivations are completely unclear and Batman's motivations for wanting to beat-down the big S are preposterous and highly unrealistic, despite the vigilante figure they cast him as.

What starts out as a fairly well-made superhero movie eventually loses its impact and motion under its own leaden weight, which is a bit of a shame. If they had lost three or so plot layers and shortened the movie by thirty minutes, it would have been much better. The closing third is just Snyder doing his rolling CG battles, which are technically sound but sadly forgettable.

Spoiler

They also tied in The Death of Superman comic miniseries into the plot, using Doomsday with a similar outcome. As if it wasn't enough that they were doing Batman vs Superman vs Lex Luthor, while introducing new Justice League characters and Wonder Woman plus backstory, the writers somehow thought it was necessary to do the Doomsday story on top!

The Wonder Woman aspect was terribly done. She was really hammy when in-character and felt out of place and a little embarrassing. Gadot certainly has the looks, but there's no way she's got the acting power to head up a superhero cast in a Justice League movie. I feel like they've made a mistake here - not that Hollywood gives a shit about acting mind you.

The best way to think about BvsS is that, while we're used to overly-simplistic and mindless superhero movies with no depth, this is an overly-complicated superhero movie that while not completely mindless, also has no depth and ends up coming undone owing to the poorly constructed motivations of its characters and a lack of stakes for the audience to cling on to at any one time. In terms of endless superhero movies I'd give it a 6, which is a half-recommendation.

[chempop]

Two documentaries this week:

My Beautiful Broken Brain http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3815136/?re ... rv_exrv_tt

Gripping, heavy, and rather cringeworthy at times. A stroke survivor records her transformative experiences following her near death brain damage recovery.

The Institute http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2386327/

WTF, this was one of the strangest social-artsy-nutso projects I've ever heard of. Genuinely shocked this was a thing

[S_Fang]

The real Mozart wasn't anything like what you see the movie, but i guess you can argue that what you see in the film is how Salieri perceived things to be, since what we are seeing stems entirely from his point of view. Still, i pity anyone watching this film with the intention of learning anything about Mozart.

Tell me about it, an aquaitance of mine use this story as a cheap example of "Natural Talent V Skills" every time we brought the argument.
So annoying. <_<

Anyway, I watched Zootropolis with my family the previous week and is a very good movie. Despite being aimed for families, it has racial and diversity themes within a buddy-cop story (the only one made by Disney that I recall were Roger Rabbit and Bonkers).
Also, sloths are very funny creatures.

[Lord Satori]

Personality aside, it's not like the movie was totally inaccurate. They took some real creative liberties when it came to Salieri, though. In reality, they were casual acquaintances at best.

[Some-Mist]

sort of off topic but sort of in line with inaccurate stories, but did anyone listen to that stern interview with sacha baron cohen regarding his desire to make a movie about freddie mercury? cohen was going to portray the crazy lifestyle stories of mercury such as a giant orgy party with midgets walking around with coke bowls on their head. supposedly he approached queen with his script, and they said they liked the idea, but the best part was when freddie dies and they'd want that to occur midway through the movie to show how queen is still successful after... so cohen scrapped the project. he'd play such an awesome freddie mercury too. he talked about it on a recent WTF with marc maron.

makes me sort of want to see the brothers grimsby even though I don't think it'll be very good and it's not in-line with cohen's other work (tho for non-cohen based films I absolutely loved him in Hugo).

[Opus131]

Tell me about it, an aquaitance of mine use this story as a cheap example of "Natural Talent V Skills" every time we brought the argument.
So annoying. <_<

Mozart is the worst example possible for that argument since he was the product of both natural talent and skill, which he cultivated since he was a toddler and maintained
though continuous hard work and feverish dedication. The travails he went through to write his Haydn quartets, which inaugurated his mature period and which show that not everything came easy for him.

[lilmanjs]

Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
What a movie! I think there's an older Criterion Collection release of this, but this is from the trilogy set they put out a couple years back (I think?). Seeing how 2 friends go off to fight as Samurai into a war, and watch it fall apart in the first 20 minutes was something else. Then we get betrayal From Musashi's friend towards his lover at home and how he's really just a coward who runs away from his problems. Musashi defies the odds and somehow makes it home to tell Otsu, but is nearly captured. Overall, this is a thought provoking movie I guess. I highly enjoyed it and await to see how the other 2 in the trilogy hold up compared to this one.

[options]

makes me sort of want to see the brothers grimsby even though I don't think it'll be very good and it's not in-line with cohen's other work

I recently saw it (for free--not something I would've paid to see.) I dunno how it compares to his others, as I haven't seen them, but if you like silly comedies, it should deliver for you. however, only about two-thirds of it is actually comedy, while the rest is simply gross-out stuff meant to make you wince and squirm in your seat. but I suppose that's nothing new. anyhow, it triggered more genuine laughs than I expected it to, and Mark Strong as the co-star plays a great straight man foil for Cohen.

[kaicooper]

Contact 1997
Good movie but ok for once
Little bit boaring...nothing much
--------

Before Trilogy (1995-2013)
Best Trilogy ever

[Some-Mist]

makes me sort of want to see the brothers grimsby even though I don't think it'll be very good and it's not in-line with cohen's other work

I recently saw it (for free--not something I would've paid to see.) I dunno how it compares to his others, as I haven't seen them, but if you like silly comedies, it should deliver for you. however, only about two-thirds of it is actually comedy, while the rest is simply gross-out stuff meant to make you wince and squirm in your seat. but I suppose that's nothing new. anyhow, it triggered more genuine laughs than I expected it to, and Mark Strong as the co-star plays a great straight man foil for Cohen.

I think mark strong is fantastic and that's sort of what I was expecting.

cohen's other films are mostly candid style where he plays as a convincing characters and goofs on people in public. borat and bruno were pretty hilarious but they're also silly/gross out humor.

[GaijinPunch]

I never had the balls to watch Irreversible, although I know I should.

It's genuinely horrific and disturbing. A very well directed movie, but unless you're a budding murdering rapist there's not much pleasure to derive from it.

One of the reviews I read on IMDB said, "if you need to enjoy your movies, don't watch this. If you watch film to learn about things and realize there is horrible shit in the world, you should watch it". One day.

[GaijinPunch]

Gal Gadot is absolute sex on legs, but christ she's a horrible actor.

I'd eat her ass like a pizza.

Contact 1997
Good movie but ok for once
Little bit boaring...nothing much
--------

Huge fan of this actually. Not sure why, and it's probably not aged as well but I love Sagan as a story teller, and I thought this was really well done. Only thing it needed more was more weirdos out in the desert.

[boagman]

I never had the balls to watch Irreversible, although I know I should.

It's genuinely horrific and disturbing. A very well directed movie, but unless you're a budding murdering rapist there's not much pleasure to derive from it.

One of the reviews I read on IMDB said, "if you need to enjoy your movies, don't watch this. If you watch film to learn about things and realize there is horrible shit in the world, you should watch it". One day.

And that's one I won't be watching, based on that statement.

[emphatic]

Batman V Superman. 4 outta 5.

Man, this was terrible.

[BIL]

I might see it just for the bit where Superman and Batman do a SUPER DP on Lex Luthor.

This happens right

Pls respond 3:

[emphatic]

I might see it just for the bit where Superman and Batman do a SUPER DP on Lex Luthor.

This happens right

Pls respond 3:

If you dress up like Lex Luthor and watch it, you better watch out. For a SUPER DP.

[GaijinPunch]

I've been making SUper Man / Batman DP wonder woman jokes for months now.