Which films have you seen lately? ΚΓ' - The thread is your movie hegemon.

[Broken_Erika]

Like a Seagal movie made a Seagal movie

 

[lymond]

The new Predator movie is quite fresh on RT

 

[Clubber Lang]

Out now on Net-flix -

 

[lymond]

Saw Predator: Badlands today. Very entertaining. Potentially could take the series in a new direction. Well, it is a "course" change for sure, one that may not please everyone. But as someone who is so far removed now from the great original, I don't care much about all that. Just wanna have fun. BTW there is a "species" that does not appear at all in this movie, and it's not the one you may be thinking of - that is true as well. Connections though, are present.

One thing I'd like to look at more closely later on streaming, which one can't really do in the theatre, is:

Spoiler Not a spoiler :

the trophies on the Dek's brother's ship, which are seen quickly a couple of times. I think there may be some easter eggs among them.

 

[Clubber Lang]

Russell Crowe stars as the Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe Hermann Göring...

As the Nuremberg trials are set to begin, a U.S. Army psychiatrist gets locked in a dramatic psychological showdown with accused Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring.

 

[lymond]

Watched Frankenstein last night. It has been years since I read the book, but the movie seemed very faithful to the source from what I recall. This may be the definitive version. Clearly a passion project for Toro. Elordi is very good as the creature. Don't know much about him. I've heard of Mia Goth, who up to now has been a British scream queen and, well, I guess this still qualifies..ha, but never actually seen her in anything. She does okay here, but probably the weakest character in the movie - but she serves her purpose. I mean, if I recall, there was not much to the character of Elizabeth in the book - she seemed mainly to be a) a source of inspiration b) a gauge to Victor's madness. We also have the great Charles Dance, briefly, and Waltz doing his Waltz thang. A brief and almost unrecognizable Ralph Ineson (his career is rocketing) and David Bradley as the blind shepherd, also barely recognizable - I recognized the voice (Bradley is so good in everything - just a fantastic character actor). And Mads' brother Lars, who has never had the star turn here, like his bro, but has been in so many things.

Very very good and visually spectacular (it is a Del Toro joint for sure). Some obvious GGI animals at one point.


Edit: I just realized that Mia also played Victor's Mother early in the movie.

 

[Kyriakos]

Russell Crowe stars as the Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe Hermann Göring...

'Tugger' Crowe is such a downgrade to Brian Cox...

Even if the new movie is less cheesy, the casting wasn't optimal.

 

[Fippy]

Nosferatu (2024)
Not very interesting..i understand that Count Orlok is historically a more brutal version of Dracula,
but this villain was mostly annoying? Especially his voice

Honestly i would prolly prefer a rewatch without sound..some nice visuals for sure, and storywise i'd miss not much.

 

[Ordnael]

Watched Naked Gun 2...it's okay. Some of the silliness was really good, other felt kindda forced.
Watched 007 No Time to die...it's better then I expected. Ana de Armas scenes were real good comedy relief, I felt shed had a natural knack for them.

 

[Clubber Lang]

'Tugger' Crowe is such a downgrade to Brian Cox...

Even if the new movie is less cheesy, the casting wasn't optimal.

Cox version will do as a warm up for the new one, interview with the new cast -

​

‘Hermann Göring loved his kids. That’s what’s terrifying’: James Vanderbilt, Rami Malek and Michael Shannon on Nuremberg​

Ryan Gilbey

Russell Crowe has a malevolent charm as the Nazi on trial in a compelling new film. His co-stars and director explain how they understood this monster – and the persistence of evil today

Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Göring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Göring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately destroyed by this discovery, and what he saw as the world’s reluctance to heed it.

The writer-director James Vanderbilt, whose script for David Fincher’s enigmatic serial-killer drama Zodiac similarly explored the real-life case of a professional being corroded by his pursuit of truth, has used The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as the basis of his new film, Nuremberg. Russell Crowe plays the preening, charismatic Göring, Rami Malek plays Kelley, and Michael Shannon is Robert Jackson, the American supreme court justice who was not only instrumental in mounting the trials but went head-to-head with Göring in court.

The line ‘Hitler made us feel German again’ is haunting. Very reminiscent of a line we hear today

For Malek, it allowed him to re-examine ideas about evil that had been on his mind since playing Safin – the man who killed James Bond, no less – in No Time to Die. “When I was playing a Bond villain, I used to remind myself, ‘He’s an evil human being.’ Then I started to question those thoughts.” He wanted to believe in evil, he says, but his empathy kept getting in the way. “The banality of it all struck me as well as it did Douglas Kelley. It must have been quite jarring for him to know that this could happen at any time, under any political regime, and it wasn’t restricted to a group of men in that period. We see now, and will continue to see, that atrocity is able to rise furiously and vigorously in mere moments. Sometimes it is because we’re willing to turn a blind eye towards it.”

Vanderbilt recognised in this material a kind of real-life Silence of the Lambs quality, with Kelley drawn into a seductive dance with a psychopath. “One of the fascinating things about Göring was that he was funny, gregarious, charming,” says the film-maker. “He loved his wife and kids – which to me makes him even more terrifying. He wasn’t Darth Vader, you know? But he craved power and was comfortable with other people suffering so long as he could maintain that power.”

Shannon witnessed his co-star’s electrifying charisma in the role. “Russell really took the note about Göring being a charming man,” he says. “Some of the people playing the other members of the Nazi high command didn’t even have lines but he always made them feel like a group. They came in together singing songs, with Russell leading them.”

Crowe had been attached to the film since 2019, and Vanderbilt had already been working on it for five years by then. But before it began shooting, another Holocaust movie emerged that adopted a radical new approach to the subject: the horrors in Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, which is set largely in the house and garden adjacent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, are heard and hinted at but never shown.

“I saw The Zone of Interest while we were in pre-production,” recalls Vanderbilt. “It’s a great film. I loved its point of view.” How concerned was he that it might leave the more traditional Nuremberg looking archaic, or even obsolete? “I think there’s room for different approaches,” he says. “Our film is a little bit more classical. A friend of mine calls a certain type of film – and The Zone of Interest isn’t one of these – ‘spinach movies’. You know: you have to eat your vegetables, do your homework, take your medicine. I worked hard to not make Nuremberg feel that way.”

Shannon believes audiences should take their dose of Nuremberg, however. “It ought to be mandatory viewing,” he says. “Everybody should see the film, and everybody should think about what happened, because it has huge relevance to what’s happening now. But also, it’s a piece of entertainment. And that’s a strange thing, to make a piece of entertainment about such a serious subject. It’s a movie in the grand, old-fashioned sense of the word.”

He, too, admires The Zone of Interest. “It puts the audience in a position where they have to imagine what they can’t see,” he says. “That’s when you’ve truly engaged them.” But whereas Glazer’s film shows next to nothing, Nuremberg takes the opposite tack: it includes a five-minute excerpt from the documentary footage of the concentration camps that was projected during the trials.

Shooting the scene in which that is played in court left Shannon feeling queasy. “While I was being filmed watching the footage, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of quote-unquote ‘acting’. I didn’t want the camera on me. Something about it seemed kind of profane, and yet I understand why it is in the film. You’ll notice I introduce the footage and then they don’t cut back to me. I think that’s a reflection on how uncomfortable I was. They probably said, ‘Let’s not cut back to Shannon. He looks funny.’”

When I relay this to Vanderbilt, he laughs and denies any such thing. “Michael was brilliant. And we’re not always supposed to be comfortable when we’re doing our work, right? I asked the cast not to watch the footage from the camps ahead of shooting because I wanted them to be fresh on the day. We brought in a real projector. We had 300 extras in court. I went in and said, ‘This is going to be a tough day, but I think it’s very important for the story we’re telling.’ We had a moment of silence, then rolled the film. I don’t want to say that no acting was required, but you’re seeing a lot of real emotions in those faces.”

One area the film-maker seems less eager to pursue is the question of what it means to be releasing Nuremberg into a world in which fascist ideas are increasingly mainstream and even detoxified, and in which one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world can give what appears to be a fascist salute in public and still go on to be richly remunerated.

Much of the dialogue in Nuremberg resonates with our times. Not least the moment when Göring says admiringly of Hitler that he “made us feel German again”. Vanderbilt denies any intentional echoes of a more recent US political slogan. “I wrote that line in 2014,” he points out. Maybe so, but he also chose to keep it in the script even once the Maga movement had gained not only adherents but ubiquity. “Sure. Look, I understand the desire to relate it to today, and I’m not saying people shouldn’t. I’m not trying to be vague. I just think that all good drama speaks to us about where we are now.”

It’s understandable that Vanderbilt should not want to deter Trump supporters from seeing his film. Malek, though, is less circumspect. “‘Hitler made us feel German again’ is a haunting line that is shattering in its simplicity,” he says. “And it’s very reminiscent of a line we hear today, which ends with the same word.” He is conspicuously not repeating the Maga slogan to which he is referring. However: “I think everyone reading your newspaper will know exactly what I mean.”

Shannon goes even further. “The danger exists outside of this movie,” he says gravely when I ask whether giving so much screen time to Göring is playing with fire. “The danger is all around us. We are suckers for this charm. It’s going to be our downfall, it seems. We’d rather be entertained than taken care of. It’s tragic, really.”

He describes the experience of life in the US today as “a nightmare. America is a nightmare right now. The country is mentally ill. It needs help. There seem to be delusions of grandeur and self-loathing in equal measure. It gets grimmer every day. I’ve never seen such dysfunction in my life. It’s really embarrassing.”

At the end of the film, Kelley is reprimanded for bashing the US while promoting his book about the Nazis. Perhaps the publicists for Nuremberg will be tearing their hair out when they hear Shannon’s remarks. “I’m sure anybody who’s associated with promoting and selling this movie to the world is going to be horrified by everything I’ve said in this interview,” he agrees. “But I don’t really care.”

• Nuremberg is in UK cinemas from 14 November, and in Australian cinemas from 4 December

 

[Clubber Lang]

Tatsuya Nakadai
R.i.P.

Tatsuya Nakadai, Legendary Japanese Actor in ‘Ran’ and ‘Harakiri,’ Dies at 92​

He also starred in filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi's 'The Human Condition' trilogy.

Hara-kiri -

Masaki Kobayashi directed Tatsuya Nakadai in the aforementioned Kwaidan and The Human Condition trilogy (among others), but their greatest collaboration would have to be Harakiri. This film represents the samurai genre at its best, being a slow-paced yet engrossing drama that explores revenge and the inherent flaws present in the samurai way of life.

It's brutal, dark, and also close to perfect, and it's currently the highest-rated film on Letterboxd. It further cemented Nakadai's acting prowess, given the tragic nature of his character and the various emotions he has to portray on-screen. It's a committed lead performance surrounded by a film that's exceptional in every other way, ensuring Harakiri stands as the best of the best when it comes to Tatsuya Nakadai films.

He also played the old crazy haunted Warlord in 'Ran' -

Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese actor of Ran, Yojimbo and Harakiri, dies aged 92​

Star of Japan’s cinematic golden age, who collaborated with Kurosawa and played the lead in Kobayashi’s Human Condition trilogy, died from pneumonia

The Japanese stage and screen actor Tatsuya Nakadai, whose celebrated performances symbolised a golden age for the country’s cinema, has died aged 92.
Nakadai garnered more than 100 screen credits during a career spanning seven decades, but is perhaps best known internationally for his role in Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic set in the Sengoku “warring states” period that took its inspiration from Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The film, in which Nakadai played the warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, earned Kurosawa his only Oscar nomination for best director.

Nakadai died from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on Saturday, the Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday, citing sources close to the actor.

While he professed to prefer stage acting – and refused to contractually bind himself to a particular film studio so he could work with a variety of directors – Nakadai is closely associated with chanbara “sword-fighting” roles in films with strong samurai themes.

He appeared in the 1962 jidaigeki period drama Harakiri – a highlight of a long and successful artistic collaboration with director Masaki Kobayashi that also brought him prominent roles in Samurai Rebellion and Kwaidan.

He starred in Kurosawa’s 1980 film Kagemusha – the story of a thief who is hired to impersonate a dying samurai warlord that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival the same year.

Nakadai, though, owed much of his success to Kobayashi, who cast him as the lead in The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961), in which he played a pacifist-socialist struggling to come to terms with Japan’s militarist rule during the second world war.

Nakadai’s talents arguably shone brightest in his appearances with Toshiro Mifune, including Kurosawa’s acclaimed 1963 police procedural High and Low, in which he played Inspector Tokura, who investigates the kidnapping of the son of Mifune’s wealthy businessman Kingo Gondo. He also played Hanbei opposite Mifune’s Sanjuro in Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo, regarded as one of the director’s greatest works.

A year later, Kurosawa reunited his leading men in Sanjuro, the sequel to Yojimbo. The film famously ends with a sword fight in which Sanjuro slices through Hanbei’s torso with lightning speed, unleashing a cascade of blood – a display of graphic violence that shocked audiences at the time. Kurosawa later denied claims that the geyser of blood had been caused by a malfunctioning prop. Whether it happened by accident or design, the scene had an enduring influence on action films and video games.

Born into a working-class family in Chiba, east of Tokyo, in 1932, Nakadai decided to take up acting as an alternative to a prohibitively expensive university education, enrolling in acting school in the early 1950s.

One of his first major film roles – reportedly the result of a chance meeting with Kobayashi when Nakadai was working as a shop assistant in Tokyo – was an uncredited part as a prisoner in Kobayashi’s 1953 war drama The Thick-Walled Room – the start of a partnership that would last three decades.

In later life Nakadai, whose stage credits included Death of a Salesman, Don Quixote, Hamlet and Macbeth, helped nurture young actors with his wife and fellow actor, Yasuko Miyazaki, with whom he opened the Mumeijuku school in Tokyo in 1975.

In 2015, Nakadai was awarded the Order of Culture – Japan’s highest honour for contributions to the arts and science – by the emperor. The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported that Nakadai had performed on stage as recently as this year.

"What befalls others today, may be your own fate tomorrow." -

 

[Kyriakos]

Ran is likely the director's best film too, and all-around a great movie.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Ran was a pretty long movie.

It was based on Shakespeare's King Lear I think?


I really liked the court jester.

Every soldier wearing a flag on their back makes it really easy to follow battles.
The soldiers know who to kill, the generals know who and where to command, and the viewers are not hopelessly lost like in most war movies.

I think they used most of the surviving Japanese medieval castles from 500 years ago to film the thing too.

Everyone carried around oceans of pride and ambition.


Anyone who liked this Kurasawa movie should check out his earlier stuff.
Japan was rebuilding from being carpet bombed in World War 2, and everything feels very raw.

Rashomon (1950) - A classic movie on unreliable narrators. Everyone tries to make themselves look good.

Seven Samurai (1954) - A classic samurai team-up movie against bandits that inspired the recent Rebel Moon movies.

Yojimbo (1961) - A wandering samurai plays with a town full of bandits.
A Fistfull of Dollars with Clint Eastwood copied it almost completely for an American audience.
However, no American movie captured the thrill of peeping out the windows constantly with so much guilty snooping on the neighbors.
Maybe Hitchcock achieved it with Rear Window 7 years earlier?

 

[Broken_Erika]

The one where Seagal fights sitting down.

 

[Kyriakos]

Predator: Badlands.
This is a fun (a bit cheesy too) movie, with a surprisingly not grim tone. In fact, tone-wise, I'd liken it to the Warcraft movie (the special effects are in general better, but at times have their own problems; more importantly it manages to keep you entertained despite the rather surface-level plot).

 

[Clubber Lang]

Millions hunt. One Runs. Eveyone watches.

 

[Clubber Lang]

The age of toys is over?

 

[Fippy]

Terminator: Badlands.
This is a fun (a bit cheesy too) movie, with a surprisingly not grim tone. In fact, tone-wise, I'd liken it to the Warcraft movie (the special effects are in general better, but at times have their own problems; more importantly it manages to keep you entertained despite the rather surface-level plot).

I actually looked for Terminator Badlands..and felt very silly soon.

 

[tjs282]

Crossover sounded plausible to me (too)

 

[Kyriakos]

Terminator, Predator, both had Arnie ^^

Plot-wise, apart from the general simplicity, I didn't like that the predators are apparently a tribal society which randomly has some high-tech too. I preferred to think (from the classic first movie) that it was just a member of the species that was into interstellar blood-lust for their personal reasons.