Last Movie Watched Thread

I saw Equilibrium for the first and only time a few years ago and I can confirm it's terrible. It's kind of amazing how boring they could make crazy gun battles but I just couldn't care about the characters or the story and also didn't much care which character was going to win the crazy gun battles.

Saw this tonight--quite intriguing movie. Apparently portions of the aerial footage are of Pripyat, Ukraine (site of Chernobyl). 

I'd bet it has some personal relevance for Glenn Close since her father was Dr. William Close, who played a major role in the first documented outbreak of Ebola in 1976. 

This may be an age thing, as I had seen The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert long before I saw The Matrix. (A couple of years felt like a long time back then, anyway).

How annoyed with Merry and Pippin was your wife this time around?

Also what was your opinion of the good moth?

The good moth is my favorite LOTR character hands down.  

Unfortunately my my favorite Hobbit character doesn’t appear in the movies.  I’m talking, of course, about the sentient talking wallet that gives Bilbo away when he’s trying to steal from the trolls.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019): It's not so much the movie (Portrait is amazing, I've said this many times) that a movie theatre opened in my state and I was able to see a movie on the big screen. I loved every second of the old ladies two rows back explaining the parallels to Orpheus and Eurydice to each other, during the movie, even as the movie spelled it out very clearly.

It was also my first time seeing Portrait on the big screen, which was both way better and also super uncomfortable at points. You don't appreciate how graphic a sex scene is until it's on a giant projector with a massive sound system.

Isolation week 12 movies

I turned on TCM and technically sat through the Marx Brothers Monkey Business and Horse Feathers but I was incredibly tired from virtual conference all week and really should have been in bed. A thing that is not pointed out often enough is how cool are those little finger-gun keystrokes Chico does when he plays piano.

Legend has it that Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine was originally conceived as a musical, and there was film of Vincent Price singing, supposedly quite well.   Apparently the producers changed there minds about that sometime during production,  and that footage is lost.
  Just imagine what could have been. 
  

Descendants 3 (2019) - Some made for TV(?) Disney thing about the descendants of famous Disney villains doing heroics or some shit. There were princesses and song & dance numbers so my daughter was into it. It was not particularly well acted or well made but it amused a small child for an hour and a half. Maybe I'd have been more into it if I'd seen the first two movies of the trilogy.

The Parent Trap (1998) - I'd only seen the 1960s one on account of being a young adult when this version came out and therefore having no reason to watch a late 90s remake of a movie for small children. Now that a small child lives in my house I've ended up seeing a lot of movies that fall into the "I was too old for this when it came out and too not a parent to see it prior to this very moment" category. This was very much a PG movie from the 1990s. There were some Home Alone style antics and Dennis Quaid. As far as child actors go, Lindsay Lohan was not as annoying as some of them are in their movies.

Inside Out (2015) - I've seen this before. I think it might be the best Pixar movie.

Despite the author being a TERF, my family and I have been going through the Harry Potter series after getting some used blurays for cheap. Being used, proceeds or the sale do not revert to Rowling. I've somehow managed to get through all the books and movies by methods such as the library or watching when they show up on tv. At this point, JK Rowling has yet to get any actual money out of me. It wasn't initially intentional, but I can't think of any other creators of popular media who I could say this for.

Anyway, on to separating the creator from their works. We watched the third, fourth and fifth movie over the weekend, which is basically my favorite stretch of the series. I find the first two movies a bit too kiddish and the last 3 movies a bit too dark. They're all well-made, but my sweet spot is apparently the space between them being really childish and them basically being one drawn-out 3 movie-long confrontation, Really, I feel like you could throw the 5th movie into that as well. Its basically one giant movie after Goblet of Fire.

I watched Fire and Ice (1983) this past weekend. I thought I'd seen it before but I remembered nothing except the 2 seconds in the climax where the guy with the ax kills the evil wizard. Possibly my older brother rented it at some point in the 90s and I saw it then?

Anyway, it's not very good, especially when considered with modern sensibilities. It's about Conan-type mighty-thewed heroes fighting against the conquering hordes of an evil wizard, but honestly, the plot feels like an excuse to animate several disconnected Frank Frazetta sketches and paintings - Death Dealer on a horse, the one where a chick in a bikini is sitting on a throne while a jaguar lies at her feet, the one where Conan leaps into battle roaring in defiance as he raises his weapons defiantly over his head.

Animation-wise, the movie is fine. It uses that Ralph Bakshi rotoscoping technique so if you find it off-putting, I do not recommend watching this. And speaking of Frank Frazetta, I hope you like his fixation on scantily-clad thicc women and equally scantily-clad large-muscled men. Actually, I hope you really like scantily-clad large-muscled men since I reckon 90% of the camera's gaze is lovingly focused on their powerful bodies in action. But that 10% focused on scantily-clad thicc women is, uh, pretty misogynistic. If you're not clear on what "male gaze" means I would suggest watching all the scenes with female characters in this movie. Thighs, asses, nipples poking through bikini tops - the gaze of the unseen male watcher savagely wanking behind the camera is suffocatingly present.

In fact, aesthetically and politically, Fire and Ice reminds me of 300. I remember walking out after the end of 300 and remarking, "Boy, that was a really fascist movie". Both movies are about perfect Aryan specimens defending their proud and noble people against hordes of dark-skinned degenerates. Women exist to be leered at but not have sex with while evil men exist to be killed and to be tempted to have sex with thanks to strong homoerotic undertones. It's really hard for me to imagine how you could make a Nazi sword and sorcery film without essentially making this movie.

Anyway, the movie is an interesting look at what was considered politically acceptable to depict 40 years ago. By the way, was there another Fire and Ice animated movie from the 80s? I could have sworn there was one about a war between fire people and underwater sea people and I initially thought it was this one.

I think the 5th movie might be my favorite, which is weird because I think Order of the Phoenix the book is kind of a bloated slog. Turns out it's a lot easier to watch someone be a surly teenager for a couple of hours than to have to inhabit the mind of a surly teenager for 800 pages. Casting Imelda Staunton was also a stroke of genius--outwardly motherly/inwardly evil movie-Umbridge is far more effective than book-Umbridge, who's described as just an ugly fat toad who likes pink (because ha ha, fat people are stupid and silly and evil, as Rowling repeatedly attests).

YES! Movie Umbridge is 1000% better than Book Umbridge. And legitimately terrifying. I've had teachers (and one step-mother) who walked that line of seeming nice but being utter pieces of shit, and Umbridge makes them look like angels.

I have a hard time with Order of the Phoenix. I really, really have a hard time reading/watching injustice & bullying. Umbridge just makes me so angry!