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Post by pantsgoblin on Feb 7, 2021 16:35:15 GMT -5
Possessor (2020)
David Cronenberg's retirement won't sting as bad if his son Brandon keeps making films of this caliber. Supremely disturbing body horror and Andrea Riseborough is one of the most fearless actors currently working.
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Post by pantsgoblin on Feb 7, 2021 18:10:12 GMT -5
Welles in F for fake is playing himself up, dressed in all black with a big black hat like some kind of guy from a 19th century print or an Edwardian stage villain. Most of it’s at Ibiza, where you have a lot of rich people dressing very casually. We’re definitely at some point teetering between classic riviera wear and trying to keep with the more casual, more radical, times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s really embarrassing (don’t need to see a fifty year-old guy in a too-tight Mickey Mouse t-shirt). Ever hate (but not hate-as-much-as-you-should)-read some of the more Eurotrashy product-placed lifestyle journalism? This is their progenitor. Patton Oswalt, cinephile that he is, no doubt reveled in the opportunity to parody F for Fake on Sam Bee's show. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 8, 2021 20:37:08 GMT -5
Spirited Away (2001) - Way more puke than I would have expected from a movie of this ilk.
승리호 (2021) - I guess the English title is "Space Sweepers" or some shit. It's basically Star Wars with a bit of Children of Men mixed in if the Rebels were Korean space garbage men.
Mortal Kombat (1995) - (90s Techno Plays) "MORTAL KOMBAT!!!!!"
One day into my two week quarantine and I’m already watching Mortal Kombat on Netflix. This does not bode well for me...
As for the actual movie for a cheesy movie based on a video game it actually wasn’t as awful as it could have been. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Christopher Lambert were both clearly having a blast chewing the scenery as Shang Tsung and Raiden respectively and the kick-punching was pretty decent which is pretty much all you can hope for with a movie like this...well that and some fan service for people who actually like the game and we got that as well.
I think it took 20 minutes before we got ever Mortal Kombat catchphrase bellowed. We also got the Johnny Cage dickpunch and Liu Kang doing the flying bicycle kick thing. Guys got uppercutted on spikes. Scorpion was a fire-breathing skeleton. All in all it was a Mortal Kombat.
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 9, 2021 20:01:22 GMT -5
Day 2 of Quarantine Movies...
Kung Fu Hustle (2004) - I kind of dig how this movie had both hard hitting kung fu battles with decapitations and limbs getting chopped off with axes as well as Loony Tunes cartoon nonsense often in the same scene. The fight scenes were cool and unlike a lot of kung fu comedies a number of the jokes were actually funny.
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994) - After watching Mortal Kombat I was talking to some people about how it might be the best video game movie of all time and someone offered up Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie as another contender. While I don’t think it worked quite as well as Mortal Kombat it did have cartoon T&A for no goddamn reason as well as Ken driving around listening to grunge hits that I would have put on a mix tape in 9th grade (Alice in Chains and Silverchair). If that doesn’t count for something then having Korn’s “Blind” during the end credits surely must.
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Post by haysoos on Feb 10, 2021 10:43:57 GMT -5
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - This was not nearly as bad as dozens of YouTube thumbnails have led me to believe "Blunder Woman", "Wonder Woman is a Moral Failure", etc. Some of the special effects are a tad janky, and the action scenes unbelievably bad in terms of pacing, tone and physics (especially the opening scene in a shopping mall), but overall it was pretty good. For once the final villain battle didn't devolve into a CGI slugfest with a giant grey monster in a sky-beam. Instead we got a crappy CGI slugfest with a little grey henchvillain in a grey background, followed by an emotional battle with a villain in a golden sky-beam. Very different.
There were certainly problems with the film. The whole conceit that no one knows about Wonder Woman at all through to the modern day because she wrecks security cameras, and puts her finger to her lips so people she rescues stay quiet is just stupid. Wonder Woman apparently being okay with the resurrected Steve usurping the body of some random dude is problematic. That final fight with Cheetah is terrible. The chase in the armoured personnel carriers is terrible. The whole scene with the bank robbers in the mall is godawful.
But Max being kind of a sleeze, thinking he's found a way around the monkey's paw, and then discovering his clever monkey paw subversion is even worse was pretty great. I was convinced it was going to end with Diana snapping Max's neck, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see Max renounce the wish and walk away into the arms of his son. I actually enjoyed it. Perhaps the negative word of mouth helped, because I was expecting the movie to be 100% terrible. 6/10
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Post by repulsionist on Feb 10, 2021 16:38:31 GMT -5
Putney Swope (1969)
This is considered a ground-breaking film worthy of inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. It was directed by Robert Downey, Sr.. The film lampoons, skewers, satirises, and upends ideas of race, the advertising business, and cultural politics of the late 1960s. Downey was an acclaimed filmmaker of rising prominence in art circles prior to this work, doing shorts and small films in NYC.
I'd seen clips as a twentysomething. I'd read of it in books about underground cinema. I knew of Downey's history after RDJ became a hot star in the 1980s. I first watched the film in full sometime in the last 10 -15 years. I thought it brilliant then. In these current climes, I can enjoy some of the jokes; some of the skewering. After the first viewing, I recall feeling that despite its white hot satire that nothing had changed much since it first appeared as a disruptive work. Watching it last night, it mostly came off like a MAD magazine story from Harvey Kurtzman in film form. Reviewing it in a post-Mad Men world (Aren't those costumes and set designs just the mostest!?!), in a openly corrupted no-this-time-really-it's-the-well-no-maybe-you-never-can-tell-end-of-empire United States where power dynamics of how things are consumed have occasionally shifted but the dynamic remains in favour of those with the most assets - gives rise to pretty much the same mixed feelings many have had in their remembrances of first encountering the film during its existence; their return to its bite for another spicy burn; then their reassessments resulting in ambivalence.
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Post by pantsgoblin on Feb 11, 2021 9:43:07 GMT -5
Terminal USA (1993)
The wacky adventures of a damaged Japanese-American family and the various leeches, hangers-on, and antagonists in early-90s Albuquerque across one night. Comparisons to early John Waters are inevitable in its entertainingly stylized performances (including an unrecognizably young Gregg Turkington a.k.a. Neil Hamburger) but it distinguishes itself by exploring cultural pressures on Asian-Americans and a giallo-level saturated color scheme. At just 54 minutes, a worthwhile diversion.
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Feb 11, 2021 17:56:43 GMT -5
Doctor Sleep (2019)
I had no interest in this mostly ignored follow up to The Shining, but I kept hearing good things about it so decided to check it out. I can confirm, it is pretty good. It's written & directed by Mike Flanagan of Haunting of Hill House, so you get that similar kind of creepy, melancholy vibe. Ewan McGregor is a grown-up Danny Torrance who it turns out has some issues after his father tried to murder him in a haunted hotel as a child. He does a pretty good job, using his hard "r" American accent. I think the real standout is Rebecca Ferguson and her top hat, as the leader of some sort of tribe of vampire like people who murder psychic children to feast on their "shining." So, content warning for child murder. Any way, Ferguson is fantastic here. Really menacing and charismatic.
I think thing I appreciated most was that, for you flashbacks and the like, they just got different actors to play the role, you know, instead of making a CGI Shelly Duval puppet to mocap around, they just got a different actor who looked some what similar and it's fine. It works. It doesn't cost $10 million dollars and isn't off putting. It made me happy to see.
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 11, 2021 21:06:59 GMT -5
My quarantine continues and now we're on a holiday so the limited amount of work from home work I was doing is gone which means all I've got is movies and video games. Here's a heap of movies I watched over the past 36 hours or so.
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy (2021) - A documentary about crack. It was overall well made and a lot of the interviewees had interesting personal accounts of their involvement with crack in the 80s and 90s but the overall story was not one that would be new to anyone even moderately well read about the failure of the War on Drugs.
Godzilla (1998) - One of those movies that was a better soundtrack than a movie unfortunately none of those good-ass songs were in the actual movie. Instead we just got a weird Jurassic Park meets Alien hybrid posing as a Godzilla movie that I spent the bulk of the runtime of wondering why Korean canned tuna fell out of a wrecked fishing boat in Jamaica in the early going. It wasn’t good.
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - This was way too long and didn’t have nearly enough Wonder Woman doing Wonder Woman shit. So dreadfully overlong was this movie that it caused me to get in trouble with the local government. I have to have some app on my phone because of my quarantine and said app just drains the shit out of my phone. So I left it charging in my bedroom while I watched the movie. Apparently if you don’t touch your phone for a long period of time the tracking app gets suspicious that you’ve just left your phone at home and gone off on plague spreading adventures so the app has some “Push this button if you’re not doing shenanigans” thing pop up. If you don’t push this button then a second “For real dude push this button or else” thing pops up a short while later. If you don’t push this one because Wonder Woman is in Egypt for no goddamn reason then they call you angrily and tell you to use the goddamn app or face fines and other penalties.
Ignoring the fact that it nearly got me deported due to how goddamn long it was there were a couple of okay bits in this movie I guess. The mall robbery scene was pretty great because said mall had both a B. Dalton Bookseller and a Waldenbooks like every mall in the 80s. Pedro Pascal was also great as Big Business or whatever his character was named but he looks weird without a mustache. If the movie was half as long and twice as mustachioed it would have been a 38% better movie.
Return to the 36th Chamber (1980) - When an evil businessman brings in Manchus to abuse the workers at his dye factory the workers enlist one of their brothers, a conman played by Gordon Liu, to pose as a Shaolin monk and scare the boss and his Manchu minions into not cutting the salaries of the workers. At first it works but they are eventually found out and everyone gets the shit kicked out of them.
In shame Gordon Liu runs away to the Shaolin temple to learn kung fu for real and after some laxative based low-brow comedy antics and a wig made out of straw gets into the temple but again is discovered to not be who he claims. The head abbot makes him erect a bunch of scaffolding as “punishment” but in doing so Gordon Loy’s character becomes a kung fu master though he doesn’t realize it at first.
Eventually he and the evil businessman have a showdown that pits scaffolding based kung fu against folding chair based kung fu and socialism against unrestricted capitalism. Who will emerge victorious?
I saw this years ago and had forgotten just how socialist it is. One of the characters literally bellows, “He’s here to avenge the workers!” when Gordon Liu’s character comes back for the final showdown. I also forgot that it has fuck all to do with the original 36th Chambers beyond the fact that there’s an extended training montage and Gordon Liu’s in it (though he’s playing a completely different dude). It’s a lot less serious than the original was with a character goofy fake bucked teeth and a bunch of slapstick antics in the fights and training scenes. Overall it’s not as good as the original but by and large a perfectly cromulent kung fu flick all the same.
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Post by pantsgoblin on Feb 11, 2021 23:12:11 GMT -5
Godzilla (1998) - One of those movies that was a better soundtrack than a movie unfortunately none of those good-ass songs were in the actual movie. Instead we just got a weird Jurassic Park meets Alien hybrid posing as a Godzilla movie that I spent the bulk of the runtime of wondering why Korean canned tuna fell out of a wrecked fishing boat in Jamaica in the early going. It wasn’t good. I won't comment on the omnipresence of the Godzilla soundtrack other than I recently nailed 1998 of when my family was recalling doing something in that year, based on The Wallflowers' dumb cover of "Heroes" at the time. Oh wait, I already did. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 12, 2021 0:00:10 GMT -5
Godzilla (1998) - One of those movies that was a better soundtrack than a movie unfortunately none of those good-ass songs were in the actual movie. Instead we just got a weird Jurassic Park meets Alien hybrid posing as a Godzilla movie that I spent the bulk of the runtime of wondering why Korean canned tuna fell out of a wrecked fishing boat in Jamaica in the early going. It wasn’t good. I won't comment on the omnipresence of the Godzilla soundtrack other than I recently nailed 1998 of when my family was recalling doing something in that year, based on The Wallflowers' dumb cover of "Heroes" at the time. Oh wait, I already did. The dumb Wallflowers cover is the only bad song on that record. There rest of it, even the boneheaded reworking of "Kashmir" by P-Diddy, rules ass. |
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Post by repulsionist on Feb 12, 2021 1:45:54 GMT -5
Jean-Luc Lemur, I'm gonna hafta corr-trek-t your error. It is Bruce Dern, not Donald Sutherland as protag in Silent Running. Great flick.
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Post by haysoos on Feb 12, 2021 10:11:20 GMT -5
Doctor Sleep (2019) I had no interest in this mostly ignored follow up to The Shining, but I kept hearing good things about it so decided to check it out. I can confirm, it is pretty good. It's written & directed by Mike Flanagan of Haunting of Hill House, so you get that similar kind of creepy, melancholy vibe. Ewan McGregor is a grown-up Danny Torrance who it turns out has some issues after his father tried to murder him in a haunted hotel as a child. He does a pretty good job, using his hard "r" American accent. I think the real standout is Rebecca Ferguson and her top hat, as the leader of some sort of tribe of vampire like people who murder psychic children to feast on their "shining." So, content warning for child murder. Any way, Ferguson is fantastic here. Really menacing and charismatic. I think thing I appreciated most was that, for you flashbacks and the like, they just got different actors to play the role, you know, instead of making a CGI Shelly Duval puppet to mocap around, they just got a different actor who looked some what similar and it's fine. It works. It doesn't cost $10 million dollars and isn't off putting. It made me happy to see. I'm actually not a big Stephen King fan, and generally think The Shining is vastly overrated. I went into Doctor Sleep not knowing it was a sequel, or even a Stephen King thingie, and actually quite enjoyed it. I think it helped that it was more of a straight-ahead monster movie than other King stories, with Danny fighting this pretty cool tribe of psychic vampire things, and using the Overlook Hotel to do it. I have no idea how it would be received if you're expecting a direct sequel to The Shining though. |
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Post by haysoos on Feb 12, 2021 10:27:19 GMT -5
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - This was way too long and didn’t have nearly enough Wonder Woman doing Wonder Woman shit. So dreadfully overlong was this movie that it caused me to get in trouble with the local government. I have to have some app on my phone because of my quarantine and said app just drains the shit out of my phone. So I left it charging in my bedroom while I watched the movie. Apparently if you don’t touch your phone for a long period of time the tracking app gets suspicious that you’ve just left your phone at home and gone off on plague spreading adventures so the app has some “Push this button if you’re not doing shenanigans” thing pop up. If you don’t push this button then a second “For real dude push this button or else” thing pops up a short while later. If you don’t push this one because Wonder Woman is in Egypt for no goddamn reason then they call you angrily and tell you to use the goddamn app or face fines and other penalties. Ignoring the fact that it nearly got me deported due to how goddamn long it was there were a couple of okay bits in this movie I guess. The mall robbery scene was pretty great because said mall had both a B. Dalton Bookseller and a Waldenbooks like every mall in the 80s. Pedro Pascal was also great as Big Business or whatever his character was named but he looks weird without a mustache. If the movie was half as long and twice as mustachioed it would have been a 38% better movie. I forgot to mention how bizarrely long Wonder Woman 1984 is. Like it goes on for freaking ever. I put it on at about 8:30 pm thinking it would end a bit past my usual bedtime, since I'm old and feeble now, but it was well after 11 when the movie was finally over. I'm not sure how long the movie actually is, but that's just way too long. Maybe they could have cut about half an hour out of that seemingly pointless race from Diana's childhood near the start of the movie, or another half hour from that endless APC car chase scene in Egypt. |
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Post by Ben Grimm on Feb 12, 2021 10:33:44 GMT -5
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - This was way too long and didn’t have nearly enough Wonder Woman doing Wonder Woman shit. So dreadfully overlong was this movie that it caused me to get in trouble with the local government. I have to have some app on my phone because of my quarantine and said app just drains the shit out of my phone. So I left it charging in my bedroom while I watched the movie. Apparently if you don’t touch your phone for a long period of time the tracking app gets suspicious that you’ve just left your phone at home and gone off on plague spreading adventures so the app has some “Push this button if you’re not doing shenanigans” thing pop up. If you don’t push this button then a second “For real dude push this button or else” thing pops up a short while later. If you don’t push this one because Wonder Woman is in Egypt for no goddamn reason then they call you angrily and tell you to use the goddamn app or face fines and other penalties. Ignoring the fact that it nearly got me deported due to how goddamn long it was there were a couple of okay bits in this movie I guess. The mall robbery scene was pretty great because said mall had both a B. Dalton Bookseller and a Waldenbooks like every mall in the 80s. Pedro Pascal was also great as Big Business or whatever his character was named but he looks weird without a mustache. If the movie was half as long and twice as mustachioed it would have been a 38% better movie. I forgot to mention how bizarrely long Wonder Woman 1984 is. Like it goes on for freaking ever. I put it on at about 8:30 pm thinking it would end a bit past my usual bedtime, since I'm old and feeble now, but it was well after 11 when the movie was finally over. I'm not sure how long the movie actually is, but that's just way too long. Maybe they could have cut about half an hour out of that seemingly pointless race from Diana's childhood near the start of the movie, or another half hour from that endless APC car chase scene in Egypt. The movie took way, way too long to get going - while there was that early mall scene with her in action as Wonder Woman, the second scene with her as WW was like 1:20 into the movie, which is ridiculous for this sort of film. |
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Post by haysoos on Feb 12, 2021 10:40:38 GMT -5
I forgot to mention how bizarrely long Wonder Woman 1984 is. Like it goes on for freaking ever. I put it on at about 8:30 pm thinking it would end a bit past my usual bedtime, since I'm old and feeble now, but it was well after 11 when the movie was finally over. I'm not sure how long the movie actually is, but that's just way too long. Maybe they could have cut about half an hour out of that seemingly pointless race from Diana's childhood near the start of the movie, or another half hour from that endless APC car chase scene in Egypt. The movie took way, way too long to get going - while there was that early mall scene with her in action as Wonder Woman, the second scene with her as WW was like 1:20 into the movie, which is ridiculous for this sort of film. Considering the janky special effects and weird campy/jokey vibe of the mall scene, I have a feeling that was added in haste after main production. So the original cut probably did have over an hour long wait before any sight of WW. |
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Post by pantsgoblin on Feb 12, 2021 15:59:25 GMT -5
I really wanted to see the 1998 Godzilla (I think must have been the summer before I started fifth grade) but my parents refused and I didn’t have the skill to successfully sneak in. *** I did finally watch Silent Running last night after having first heard of it as a child. It’s known as a special effects film, but the effects are mostly pretty bad—there are some good shots, but those tend to be good for their composition or imagination. I have to think that the ship was orbiting Saturn because during the production of 2001 they thought the effects crew couldn’t do a convincing job, and it really isn’t that convincing here either, but as an impressionistic view it’s definitely a success, as is Trumbulll’s idea of depicting the rings—tiny ice particles, after all—as an iridescent storm. Speaking of orbiting Saturn, the science is really dumb, unconvincing to three year-old me dumb. And the first fifteen minutes are terrible—every 70s cliché possible in attitude (and lots of period worldbuilding cliichés too). And then Joan Baez starts singing. I was ready to bail. But after that first song starts the movie gets really good, engrossingly good. Once the actual jeopardy starts—the forest domes are to be destroyed, Donald Sutherland’s character rebels, and we get a lot of good period astronaut stuff followed by 75 minutes of Donald Sutherland in space essentially alone. And he just owns it—it’s great watching him and his character has a depth and naturalness (hmm) that you wouldn’t expect from the dumb premise. It goes from “worst thing ever” to highly recommended. There’s always some interesting retro-future stuff here too. As bad as the outside effects are—and the domed forests don’t really rise above obvious sets—the rest of the spaceship interiors are pretty good. The control room would seem realistic for the time, even if it’s what we wouldn’t expect even the near future to be like now (it’s still not bad for the present, though, given how much NASA and Roscosmos rely on proven technology). The robots are crude in how they pretty much non-communicate with Sutherland, but they have fine motor skills and actual, child-like learning that still elude us. There’s also a (circular) pool-playing robot (and honestly circular pool or billiards seems like a cool concept)—the rec room is obviously dated to that midcentury-modern-starting-to-go-seventies look, which is kind of awesome. You probably already know this, but Joel Hodgson cites Silent Running as one of the three inspirations for MST3K, what with Dern's robot pals in space. The other two being Heston heckling Woodstock: The Movie in Omega Man and the inside cover of Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road with the silhouettes in front of the projection. |
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Post by MrsLangdonAlger on Feb 12, 2021 20:20:03 GMT -5
I watched Saint Maud and now every single one of my wigs live up in Heaven with God.
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 12, 2021 21:50:26 GMT -5
PlagueFest ‘21 continues...
LA 92 (2017) - The first couple minutes of this 2017 documentary about the 1992 LA Riots cover the Watts Riots and end with a reporter asking a dude when he thinks it will stop. The man replies, “I don’t think it will ever stop really.”
“Never?” Asks the reporter.
“I mean it may not be like this,” clarifies the man, “but I don’t think it will ever stop.”
Sadly I think that random man on the street interviewee might be right since outside of the clothes and hairstyles nothing really seems to have changed between 1965 and 1992 and 2020.
The documentary itself is very well done consisting almost entirely of news footage and home video recordings from that time (there are some intertitle cards to give dates and locations but no narrator or newly recorded talking head interviews) which I think is a good choice since it allows the view to experience the anger and sadness and frustration of the black more directly then they might otherwise would have if footage from 1992 was constantly interrupted by former politicians or local activists giving their recollections 20 some odd years after the fact.
Brutal and emotionally draining but definitely worth watching if for nothing else than to see exactly how little anything has changed in American society in the nearly 30 years that have passed since Rodney King.
Death to 2020 (2020) - There were a few lines in this comedic recap of the year that was that made me chuckle in the same way a random sketch comedy show might. You know that sort of “Heh...I see what you were going for there,” chuckle of comedic acknowledgement rather than a “Shit I’m going to pass out from laughing too hard,” genuine laughter. Besides it was only like an hour long so whatever.
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Post by Floyd Diabolical Barber on Feb 13, 2021 13:01:05 GMT -5
I really wanted to see the 1998 Godzilla (I think must have been the summer before I started fifth grade) but my parents refused and I didn’t have the skill to successfully sneak in. *** I did finally watch Silent Running last night after having first heard of it as a child. It’s known as a special effects film, but the effects are mostly pretty bad—there are some good shots, but those tend to be good for their composition or imagination. I have to think that the ship was orbiting Saturn because during the production of 2001 they thought the effects crew couldn’t do a convincing job, and it really isn’t that convincing here either, but as an impressionistic view it’s definitely a success, as is Trumbulll’s idea of depicting the rings—tiny ice particles, after all—as an iridescent storm. Speaking of orbiting Saturn, the science is really dumb, unconvincing to three year-old me dumb. And the first fifteen minutes are terrible—every 70s cliché possible in attitude (and lots of period worldbuilding cliichés too). And then Joan Baez starts singing. I was ready to bail. But after that first song starts the movie gets really good, engrossingly good. Once the actual jeopardy starts—the forest domes are to be destroyed, Donald Sutherland’s character rebels, and we get a lot of good period astronaut stuff followed by 75 minutes of Donald Sutherland in space essentially alone. And he just owns it—it’s great watching him and his character has a depth and naturalness (hmm) that you wouldn’t expect from the dumb premise. It goes from “worst thing ever” to highly recommended. There’s always some interesting retro-future stuff here too. As bad as the outside effects are—and the domed forests don’t really rise above obvious sets—the rest of the spaceship interiors are pretty good. The control room would seem realistic for the time, even if it’s what we wouldn’t expect even the near future to be like now (it’s still not bad for the present, though, given how much NASA and Roscosmos rely on proven technology). The robots are crude in how they pretty much non-communicate with Sutherland, but they have fine motor skills and actual, child-like learning that still elude us. There’s also a (circular) pool-playing robot (and honestly circular pool or billiards seems like a cool concept)—the rec room is obviously dated to that midcentury-modern-starting-to-go-seventies look, which is kind of awesome. The interior shots of the "Valley Forge" spaceship were filmed inside a newly decommissioned, and soon to be scrapped Navy vessel named the "Valley Forge". All those futuristic interiors were cleverly reimagined and repurposed 1940's or 50's destroyer (or battleship or some other naval ship) cabins and control rooms. Also, the robots were double amputees in robot suits. "And poor little Louie, God rest him, isn't with us anymore. " |
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Post by ganews on Feb 13, 2021 19:03:56 GMT -5
Passengers
I imagine that at some point after Star Wars: The Force Awakens or similar, someone explained to a Hollywood screenwriter or producer the scale of space, and that led to this movie concept pitch. 5000 passengers are on the Wall-E spaceship en route to a colony planet but they are all in suspended animation, but something goes wrong and Chris Pratt wakes up. Only him - with no way to turn the ship around or call for help, 90 Earth-years until they get to destination, no one else awake, and nothing for company but android bartender Michael Sheen. After a year of futile repair attempts and despair, he chances on sleeping writer Jennifer Lawrence. After some light agonizing, he breaks her out of hibernation and pretends it was an accident like him. The movie takes pains to show that their falling in love is fairly organic, but it also doesn't shy from the fact that he has sentenced her to death with him. Of course she finds out. Being Hollywood, she takes him back when he sacrifices himself to stop the ship exploding, even declining to use the suspended animation pod they gain access to. The movie is not crass enough to point out that stopping the explosion is a two-person job so 5000 people would have died if he hadn't condemned a woman and entered a sexual relationship under false pretenses.
So, good concept with pretty bland execution. The characters aren't any deeper than their respective actor personas - StarlordChris Pratt even gets a Dance Dance Revolution room. The few details to enrich the universe only raise more questions. Jennifer Lawrence planned to travel 120 years asleep, spend a year at the colony, then travel 120 years back and write a book? Hope she opened an interest-bearing account before she left, if there is room among all the retirees with the same idea. I wonder what sort of rootless, depressed, millennia-old people work as crew making trips back and forth. The colonists have to give the spaceship company 20% of future earnings, but it's not like the Earth-based company has any authority or even ability to collect the money.
2016 was the perfect year for this movie to come out.
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Post by repulsionist on Feb 13, 2021 19:47:35 GMT -5
Mulan (2020)
Spectacle. Beautiful colours. Grand, sweeping vistas, sets, and so forth. Bland characterisations. Final boss fight takes more than a few cues from "Homeless Hare". What will Disney think of next?!?
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Post by Floyd Diabolical Barber on Feb 13, 2021 20:58:56 GMT -5
Floyd Diabolical Barber That’s really cool! I wondered why the ship was called the Valley Forge. The ships are well designed, even if the model work doesn’t hold up to Trumbull’s work in 2001 and TMP, with the domes as modules on a flexible, independent frame. But why were they contracted out from American Airlines? I’d think Boeing or some other military contractor would make more sense. pantsgoblin I knew about the influence on MST3k, but didn’t realize how strong it was—Dern really comes across as Joel Robinson with guilt gnawing at the back of his head. I can see Dern’s manner really connecting with a little kid—he’s really gentle and innocent, plus does a lot of cool inventive stuff to make his environment his own (and defeats his bullies and escapes his authority figures), even if a lot of the thematic stuff went completely over their heads. I don't remember the American Airlines connection, it's been a long time since I've seen the movie. Some sort if product placement funding deal, maybe? As for Bruce Dern's gentleness and innocence, he did have to atone for shooting John Wayne six or eight times in "The Cowboys" that same year. Those two movies alone display the range of characters Dern can bring to life. |
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Feb 15, 2021 16:42:32 GMT -5
Doctor Sleep (2019) I had no interest in this mostly ignored follow up to The Shining, but I kept hearing good things about it so decided to check it out. I can confirm, it is pretty good. It's written & directed by Mike Flanagan of Haunting of Hill House, so you get that similar kind of creepy, melancholy vibe. Ewan McGregor is a grown-up Danny Torrance who it turns out has some issues after his father tried to murder him in a haunted hotel as a child. He does a pretty good job, using his hard "r" American accent. I think the real standout is Rebecca Ferguson and her top hat, as the leader of some sort of tribe of vampire like people who murder psychic children to feast on their "shining." So, content warning for child murder. Any way, Ferguson is fantastic here. Really menacing and charismatic. I think thing I appreciated most was that, for you flashbacks and the like, they just got different actors to play the role, you know, instead of making a CGI Shelly Duval puppet to mocap around, they just got a different actor who looked some what similar and it's fine. It works. It doesn't cost $10 million dollars and isn't off putting. It made me happy to see. I'm actually not a big Stephen King fan, and generally think The Shining is vastly overrated. I went into Doctor Sleep not knowing it was a sequel, or even a Stephen King thingie, and actually quite enjoyed it. I think it helped that it was more of a straight-ahead monster movie than other King stories, with Danny fighting this pretty cool tribe of psychic vampire things, and using the Overlook Hotel to do it. I have no idea how it would be received if you're expecting a direct sequel to The Shining though. It worked well for me as a Shining sequel, but I've only ever seen the movie, and then probably only twice. I mean, Dr. Sleep isn't going into the horror movie canon or anything, but it's enjoyable with a decent plot and good performances. Maybe I'm just happy it's not a prequel where you get an origin on the bathtub lady and dude in the dog suit and a terrible scene in which an indigenous person has to curse the hotel or something. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 15, 2021 22:45:54 GMT -5
I'm still under quarantine and thus have naught to do except watch movies, pro-wrestling and play video games. Here are movies
Scorekeeper (2020) - This was some Star Wars fan movie thing that I watched on YouTube. I’ve never watched a fan film of any sort before but my daughter saw stormtroopers on the little preview image thing on YouTube and wanted to watch it so we did. Plot was it was more or less an homage to Predator with Bossk standing in for the titular Predator. The costumes and effects were pretty good I guess. The acting was student film level. It was fine for a 16 minute Star Wars thing I saw on YouTube.
Disciples of the 36th Chamber (1985) - I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one before. Among the 36th Chambers flicks this one is easily the worst. Maybe it was because the main character was just a dick. Maybe because the bulk of the movie was a comedy but it didn’t really click for me until the last ten minutes when we got the requisite EVERYBODY FIGHTS final showdown. That final battle was pretty goddamn great with Gordon Liu in drag busting out of a bridal palanquin to wreck shop on Manchus with a three part staff but everything prior to that was mediocre at best.
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repulsionist
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actively disinterested
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Post by repulsionist on Feb 16, 2021 15:34:04 GMT -5
The Firm (1989)
Not the Grisham adaptation. This is Gary Oldman's thing wherein an England that still exists appears as ugly, ridden with violence. The story concerns an up-and-comer whose fashion and hairstyle might predict that of Gavin McInnes. Unpleasant as a social document. Unpleasant as news topic dramatised for purported understanding but most probably courting 'clicks' as one might say nowadays. For armchair anthropologists and nostalgia hoovers who have enjoyed Scum and Made in Britain.
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Post by pantsgoblin on Feb 17, 2021 11:49:57 GMT -5
Modern Romance (1981)
I somehow had never seen an Albert Brooks movie before now, despite considering him probably the GOAT recurring Simpsons guest star.
There's a famous story that Stanley Kubrick called up Brooks in the middle of the night from England and told him he loved the movie and had always wanted to do a film about jealousy. I like to imagine that Kubrick also said "I wish I could have made Jack Torrance as creepy, manipulative, and off-putting as your character in that."
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Ben Grimm
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Post by Ben Grimm on Feb 17, 2021 12:20:39 GMT -5
Modern Romance (1981) I somehow had never seen an Albert Brooks movie before now, despite considering him probably the GOAT recurring Simpsons guest star. There's a famous story that Stanley Kubrick called up Brooks in the middle of the night from England and told him he loved the movie and had always wanted to do a film about jealousy. I like to imagine that Kubrick also said "I wish I could have made Jack Torrance as creepy, manipulative, and off-putting as your character in that." Watch Defending Your Life next - it's probably my favorite of his films. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 17, 2021 20:03:53 GMT -5
Ghostbusters (2016) - This did not ruin my childhood forever by totally erasing every last trace of the previously existing equally mediocre Ghostbusters from the universe or make me angry for reminding me that woman exist which seemed to by the two big internet outrage complaints about this. Mostly it was just a movie some of which was funny. It was not a great movie but neither was the original so I’m not surprised.
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ABz B👹anaz
Grandfathered In 
This country is (now less of) a shitshow.
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Post by ABz B👹anaz on Feb 17, 2021 20:08:27 GMT -5
Ghostbusters (2016) - This did not ruin my childhood forever by totally erasing every last trace of the previously existing equally mediocre Ghostbusters from the universe or make me angry for reminding me that woman exist which seemed to by the two big internet outrage complaints about this. Mostly it was just a movie some of which was funny. It was not a great movie but neither was the original so I’m not surprised. Right?! I enjoyed it for the most part. The "main villain" was ridiculous but it was still a fun movie. All of the women are great, but Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones are fucking hysterical. I love them both! |
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