Which films have you seen lately? Vol. 21: Now in CinemaScope!

[lymond]

I haven't seen it since it came out, but I loved it. I don't remember thinking it felt pretentious.

Same here. I thought it was perfect. The little girl was great - she starred in that Shannara series a while back.

 

[BenitoChavez]

The Pale Man from the banquet scene in is one of the creepiest monsters ever. Right up there with Xenomorphs from Alien and the screaming bear from Annihilation. True nightmare fuel.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm, I don't think I liked Pan's Labyrinth, maybe it just didn't live up to the unreal hype. But it had its style. It certainly was better than Blade II
The violence was a bit too artificial.
My favorite spanish/spanish speaking horror movie is probably Rec1.

 

[Kyriakos]

The Last Duel (or something like that)
Might as well have named it the dance of inconsistencies. How would a non-insane young person make up () someone in his own non-shared recollections?
The "from the side of" has been used in much better films, in far less crude way.

 

[Kyriakos]

Rip Robin Williams.

 

[Takhisis]

Last week, I saw a film. As I recall, it was a silent film: King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), which turns out to have been his personal favourite, a film socially conscious enough to have gotten MGM execs to delay its release by one year.

 

[Kyriakos]

Uncut Gems.
Some Adam Sandler drama.
Imo it was rather forced and ultimately not good. Doesn't help that it goes on for over 2 hours.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) is great, provided you enjoy or have some interest in punk rock, or in music-centered subcultures in general. I'm not sure how much it has for a general audience, and anyone who's ever described music as 'noise' should probably stay away. I liked the behind-the-scenes interviews with The Germs, Black Flag, and especially X. I wanted to see more of the Circle Jerks and Fear, who were the bands in the film that I listened to the most, back in the day. I'm interested to look into Catholic Discipline more. I've never really heard them much. I read that one of the 'Light Bulb Kids' was Dinah Cancer of 45 Grave, but I didn't recognize her.

Lucy (2014) started out fun, but then jumped the shark and frankly got kind of boring. Not the dumpster-fire I was expecting, though. Johansson is always nice to watch, and I thought she gave a good performance when she was allowed to, like the close-up when she was talking to her mom. I was excited to see Morgan Freeman with Johansson - I didn't even realize he was in the movie when I started it - but by the time their characters got in the same room, I had mostly tuned out. Did she actually travel back in time or was she having some kind of vision/hallucination? I dunno. It turned out that I didn't much care. If anybody wants to do an actual techno-thriller with Johansson & Freeman, I'd be down. Not literally a remake of Enemy of the State (1998) with Smith & Hackman, but I'm imagining something like that.

The Flash (2023) was more fun than I'd been told. It's bad in so many ways, don't get me wrong, all of the criticisms are valid, but I thought it was funny. I'm not sure it passed the Six Laughs Test, but I think it had four. There's a good workplace comedy to be made with Sanjeev Bhaskar and Saoirse-Monica Jackson, whose American accents were almost jarring. If it also had a character who was a superhero, that'd be fine. The whole scene with the doofy pals was a riot. The guy with the Eric Stoltz tattoo that's not actually upside-down. Jackson belching "I am Batman." This version of Supergirl had some promise. The prison-break scene was fun and Sasha Calle had some charm, even if she ultimately had nothing to do. I liked seeing Keaton's Batman. Pretty much everything else about the movie was poor.

 

[Kyriakos]

Tried to watch the Beanie Bubble, some movie starring Zack Galifianakis.
The first 7 minutes were a monologue about how the movie isn't about Zack's character.
So I erased it.

 

[lymond]

The Flash (2023)

Yeah, meant to comment on this one. I saw it a week or two ago on Max. It was entertaining enough, but as you said, flawed in so many ways. I think part of it is that there was too much Ezra. Honestly, don't know much about the actor other than the earlier JL stuff, but he started rubbing me the wrong way once he went back in time. Probably the coolest thing about the movie was the nod to all the past superhero stuff

Spoiler :

even things that were never released like Smith's version of Superman with Nicolas Cage

 

[EgonSpengler]

Yeah, meant to comment on this one. I saw it a week or two ago on Max. It was entertaining enough, but as you said, flawed in so many ways. I think part of it is that there was too much Ezra. Honestly, don't know much about the actor other than the earlier JL stuff, but he started rubbing me the wrong way once he went back in time. Probably the coolest thing about the movie was the nod to all the past superhero stuff

Spoiler :

even things that were never released like Smith's version of Superman with Nicolas Cage

I really disliked the visuals of every scene inside the Speed Force.

I also didn't like their explanation of how time travel works, although I'm intrigued that

Spoiler :

Barry didn't actually get home. He meddled with history again and propelled himself into yet another parallel dimension. I wonder if he's stuck traversing alternate universes now, like the people in Sliders. There should be another alternate Barry now, too, one who's native to this alternate dimension where George Clooney is Bruce instead of Ben Affleck. And, back in the universe where Bruce is played by Ben Affleck, Barry has presumably disappeared without a trace. That's if the writers of this movie were paying attention to the movie they themselves had just written (which shouldn't be too much to ask, but sometimes you have to wonder... ).

 

[EvaDK]

Lucy (2014) started out fun, but then jumped the shark and frankly got kind of boring. Not the dumpster-fire I was expecting, though. Johansson is always nice to watch, and I thought she gave a good performance when she was allowed to, like the close-up when she was talking to her mom. I was excited to see Morgan Freeman with Johansson - I didn't even realize he was in the movie when I started it - but by the time their characters got in the same room, I had mostly tuned out. Did she actually travel back in time or was she having some kind of vision/hallucination? I dunno. It turned out that I didn't much care. If anybody wants to do an actual techno-thriller with Johansson & Freeman, I'd be down. Not literally a remake of Enemy of the State (1998) with Smith & Hackman, but I'm imagining something like that.

Lucy is fairly entertaining and energizing to watch, but the premise is complete nonsense and has no root in facts If you're into techno thrillers - have you watched Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days from the late 90s?

Oh, I remember listening a bit to Black Flag and finding Henry Rollins to be a very fascinating person. My punk period was intense, but short

 

[Kyriakos]

Oh, I remember listening a bit to Black Flag and finding Henry Rollins to be a very fascinating person. My punk period was intense, but short

You tried to mingle with the animals ^^

Spoiler :

 

[tjs282]

If you're into techno thrillers - have you watched Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days from the late 90s?

1995, but yeah, that's a really good movie. I liked it so much, I bought the company soundtrack on CD. If I ever found it streaming on one of our subs, I'd definitely be down for a re-watch.

Would certainly beat the hell out of this evening's viewing, which was Knight&Day.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Lucy is fairly entertaining and energizing to watch, but the premise is complete nonsense and has no root in facts If you're into techno thrillers - have you watched Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days from the late 90s?

Indeed, saw it in the theater and it's one of the handful of DVDs I own (although I don't currently own a DVD player). One of my favorite movies.

1995, but yeah, that's a really good movie. I liked it so much, I bought the company soundtrack on CD. If I ever found it streaming on one of our subs, I'd definitely be down for a re-watch.

Would certainly beat the hell out of this evening's viewing, which was Knight&Day.

All of Bigelow's early stuff was unavailable to stream until just this January. There must have been some kind of rights issue. I just watched Blue Steel (1989) a few weeks ago, on Amazon Prime. Strange Days is on MAX. Peacock has Point Break (1991). Near Dark (1987) was also streaming earlier this year, but it looks like it's gone again. It's not streaming anywhere in the US, right now.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Watched Mon Oncle, an interesting French film by Jacques Tati which does not depend on dialogue, but rather visuals. It's the story of a little boy being raised by parents in an ugly modernist home, consumed with materialism and efficiency and the like, who much prefers outings with his uncle in the pre-modern human parts of the city where things are messy and interesting. Lovely music.

]

 

[Kyriakos]

Reptile (2023)
At least it has Alicia Silverstone, so you can pretend it is the 90s.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Continuing my string of enjoying bad movies, Meg 2: The Trench (2023) is by far the most ridiculous thing I've seen lately. It passed the Six Laughs Test with flying colors, and I really have no idea whether it was deliberate or not. When I rate movies, I try to judge them by their own efforts and intentions, but sometimes I just can't tell what a movie was trying to do. Asteroid City was the last of these, and now Meg 2. For the time being, I'm judging the latter as an action-creature-feature (Jurassic Park; Crawl). If, however, I learn that it was actually meant to be a comedy-creature-feature (Tremors; Lake Placid), I'll have to almost double its rating.

 

[EgonSpengler]

After so much cheese, I felt a little bloated and needed a real movie: Eastern Promises (2007) to the rescue. Technically this was a rewatch, but I really didn't remember anything, so it was like seeing it for the first time again. It's a good neo-noir, if you're into that (sub)genre. I thought it did a good job of hiding its cards. It's an unusual Cronenberg movie, in that it's not a "body horror" story. (Although there is the one scene, the naked knife-fight. I guess ol' Dave just can't help himself. ) In some ways, it's bog-standard neo-noir gangster story, albeit expertly executed, but it does mess you around a little. Not in a "I never saw that coming" sort of way, but in a way that you can see a couple of different things sitting on the table, and you're not sure until the end which one it's going to pick up. I really couldn't tell, for example, whether...

Spoiler :

Nikolai was going to be the 'gangster with a conscience' who turns on his bosses, or was an undercover cop all along. This movie held back on that reveal much longer than some might have, so that by the time it does tell us, I really didn't know which way it was going to go.

I also liked the ending, when...

Spoiler :

it became evident that Nikolai probably isn't planning to destroy the crime family, but instead take it over. Hard to know what happens then. Does he become some kind of principled gangster? I also liked that he and Anna didn't hook up; but then he kissed her, 'cause let's face it, who among us wouldn't, if we had the chance?; but then, he knew that he couldn't ever see her again, because he didn't want anyone he might care about to be caught up in his life.

In that sense, it's kind of a reversal of one of the typical gangster storlines, the "We gotta get out of this place" story. I normally don't care for gangster movies, but I do like that variation: Superfly; A Better Tomorrow; The Long Good Friday. This one sort of bats you around with what type of gangster story it's going to be, but I never felt like the movie couldn't make up its mind; it knows what it's doing, it just doesn't feel like it has to let you know what it's doing (which itself kind of fits the gangster motif, doesn't it?).

 

[lymond]

I believe I saw that one in the theatre actually. Good movie, but like you I barely remember it either other than the scene you mentioned. Ha..hard to forget that one.