Which films have you seen lately Vol.22 Now with Smell-O-Vision.

[lymond]

Boogie Nights, 1997. Star-filled cast explores 1970s/1980s porno with Mark Wahlberg. Appearances by Burt Reynolds and a bunch of known actors. Nice music. Cars were tolerable. Dug the chick on rollerskates.

Some excellent moments in the film, and performances, but quite a few things that did not work for me. Regardless, Heather Graham did look amazing in all her glory.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Some excellent moments in the film, and performances, but quite a few things that did not work for me. Regardless, Heather Graham did look amazing in all her glory.

Possibly the only thing I'll remember about it.

Mean Streets, 1973. Early Scorcese film about the New York Mafia, featuring a young Robert de Niro (pre-Taxi Driver), as well as a youngish David Proval, better known as Richie Aprile from The Sopranoes. I was surprised he was the only Sopranoes actor I recognized.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Late Night With the Devil (2023) - David Dastmalchian plays a late-night tv host in 1977 who tries to boost his ratings with a special sweeps-week Halloween show that features a teenage girl who may be possessed. Pretty fun. I was hoping it would be scarier. I went into it thinking it was perhaps a modern homage to Demons (1985), which I watched almost exactly a year ago. It's not.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) - Indie gem out of the Sundance Film Festival that debuted the 21-yr-old younger sister of tv stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. She plays a woman fleeing a cult in upstate New York who moves in with her sister and brother-in-law. Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, Hugh Dancy, and Maria Dizzia. This film also sneaks in the feature-film debut of another young star, albeit in only a small role: Your future Silver Surfer, Julia Garner.

Begin Again (2013) - John Carney doing his thing, with Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightly and Hailee Steinfeld. It was fine. It's a John Carney movie, but with big names in the cast. I guess I sort of thought the cast of names would elevate it to the next level, but it didn't, really. I liked it well enough, but I think my expectations were too high. Also, Google says Ruffalo is 5' 8" and Knightley is 5' 7", but I think those numbers were fudged, 'cause she looked noticeably taller than him. Could'a been wearing heels or platforms, I guess.

Chinatown (1974) - A classic neo-noir. Jack Nicholson plays a private detective in 1937 L.A. who cuts himself shaving. Hired by yet-another-wife to take pictures of yet-another-philandering-husband, he stumbles into something bigger, and in true film noir fashion, all the bad guys go to jail and our heroes live happily ever after. Screenwriter Robert Towne, who just passed away a few weeks ago, won an Oscar. Jerry Goldsmith's film-noir score is perfect, led by trumpet player Uan Rasey.

EDIT: Martha Marcy May Marlene stars Elizabeth Olsen. Didn't intend to be coy about it. [IMG alt=""]https://forums.civfanatics.com/data/assets/smilies/lol.gif[/IMG]

 

[warpus]

Just finished watching Hypnotic starring Ben Affleck.

Where to begin..

It's actually not a bad concept for a movie, and it's beautifully shot, but throughout the film you just can't help but feel that there's something low budget about it. This feeling really explodes all over your face in the scenes where the sky folds in on itself, a la inception. That just looked so fake and wrong.. Come on, if you're going to steal something like this from a famous movie, at least make it look half decent! Same thing with the special effects that popped up whenever the hypnotism voodoo superpowers were in full swing.. They seemed to have spent a decent amount of $$$ on this movie, and all the other special effects looked decent, so why did that have to look like crap? These were supposed to be the most climactic parts of the movie, but they just ended up falling flat as a result.

This movie is way too.. how do you English speaking people put it.. way too on the nose. This movie leans hard into a whole bunch of cliches, as if the person watching the movie is experiencing them for the very first time. Somewhat naive writing from that pov. There is little subtlety, which this movie could have used at least a bit of. It just goes all in on these overdone cliches, not to mention that it steals several concepts from other well known movies.. and tries to mold and shape them into something entertaining.

And don't get me wrong, this was entertaining enough, but like I said you continually get this feeling that you're watching a low budget production, even though Ben Affleck is on the screen 90% of the time and visually the movie is stunning, from the cinematography pov as well... and the overall concept and idea for the movie is not so bad. I'm putting down some of it to the occasionally poor dialogue, although it's not horrible.. A lot of it just feels so cliche, occasionally you can even sort of see Affleck trying overly hard to make it sound good.

Overall I don't really know where to begin, still. There were some good ideas here, but it's like the people making the movie decided that the target audience would be somebody who has never watched a sci-fi or fantasy movie before. Also somebody completely unaware of sci-fi or fantasy tropes or cliches of any kind. Also somebody who doesn't mind the most climactic parts of the movie having questionable special effects.

I do think that if this movie was cleaned up a bit, with like 15% better dialogue, a screenplay rewrite that made things flow better and added a bit of nuance, and had those special effects fixed.. it could have actually been a 7.5/10! or maybe even a 7.8. I do like that the movie took some chances here and there, and the story didn't go where I thought it would, but overall this might be the worst Ben Affleck movie I have seen..... but to be fair, I haven't seen many.

 

[Clubber Lang]

“Alien: Romulus” takes the phenomenally successful “Alien” franchise back to its roots: While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Late Night With the Devil (2023) - David Dastmalchian plays a late-night tv host in 1977 who tries to boost his ratings with a special sweeps-week Halloween show that features a teenage girl who may be possessed. Pretty fun. I was hoping it would be scarier. I went into it thinking it was perhaps a modern homage to Demons (1985), which I watched almost exactly a year ago. It's not.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) - Indie gem out of the Sundance Film Festival that debuted the 21-yr-old younger sister of tv stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. She plays a woman fleeing a cult in upstate New York who moves in with her sister and brother-in-law. Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, Hugh Dancy, and Maria Dizzia. This film also sneaks in the feature-film debut of another young star, albeit in only a small role: Your future Silver Surfer, Julia Garner.

Begin Again (2013) - John Carney doing his thing, with Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightly and Hailee Steinfeld. It was fine. It's a John Carney movie, but with big names in the cast; I guess I sort of thought the cast of names would elevate it to the next level, but it didn't, really. I liked it well enough, but I think my expectations were too high. Also, Google says Ruffalo is 5' 8" and Knightley is 5' 7", but I think those numbers were fudged, 'cause she looked noticeably taller than him. Could'a been wearing heels or platforms, I guess.

Chinatown (1974) - A classic neo-noir. Jack Nicholson plays a private detective in 1937 L.A. who cuts himself shaving. Hired by yet-another-wife to take pictures of yet-another-philandering-husband, he stumbles into something bigger, and in true film noir fashion, all the bad guys go to jail and our heroes live happily ever after. Screenwriter Robert Towne, who just passed away a few weeks ago, won an Oscar. Jerry Goldsmith's film-noir score is perfect, led by trumpet player Uan Rasey.

I forgot one:

Super 8 (2011) - J.J. Abrams' successful homage to adventure movies of the 1980s, about 5 kids making a movie, when things *ahem* go off the rails. Kind of a spiritual predecessor to Stranger Things. Featuring a 12-year-old Elle Fanning and a 16-yr-old Gabriel Basso, with Kyle Chandler and Noah Emmerich, and you'll recognize a lot of the supporting cast.

 

[lymond]

Well, I actually went and saw Longlegs for no particular reason other than maybe to get away from the heat. Overall, I'd say it was rather meh. The performances and atmosphere were solid, and it started out well. However, the story was ultimately just not all that great IMO. I believe it will be a very subjective viewing experience, but then most horrors are to a degree. Cage did well playing a very strange character - he is basically unrecognizable. I've always liked Cage, but I think knowing it was him actually detracted from the experience as I kinda honed in on that aspect. Yet, it was a character well suited to his particular talents. It may be worth a watch for some as it really depends on how the subject matter affects you - it did not for me. I do understand why the user scores are less than the critic scores.

In summary, the move starts well and slow burns nicely for first half or so. Entertaining enough up until the last bits which are a letdown, in large part as it really was not shocking or subtle at all. The movie does have some originality to it - I will give it that.

 

[Fippy]

I do understand why the user scores are less than the critic scores.

They usually are these days..
Critic scores as a whole are pretty worthless with so much money involved, they absolutely make sure that some "critics" are on their side.

 

[Kyriakos]

Still from the movie, "The Return".
Fiennes plays Odysseus, Binoche (I suppose) plays Penelope.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I do understand why the user scores are less than the critic scores.

I've never really figured out how to weigh critical reviews of movies. I tend to avoid reviews of a movie once I've decided whether I want to see it, and then maybe go back to them after I've seen the movie, if I'm still interested.

They usually are these days..

I think one big difference between critics and audiences is that audiences would naturally tend to go to movies they expect to like. Critics see a lot of things they expect to dislike or be uninterested in. They also try to evaluate how well-made a film is, which is different from how enjoyable it is. Audiences are usually more interested in the latter.

Critic scores as a whole are pretty worthless with so much money involved, they absolutely make sure that some "critics" are on their side.

This doesn't seem to hold up, at a glance. Looking at the Metacritic scores for 2024 releases, a lot of big movies got "meh" critical reviews. Just skimming the top 24 films (e.g. the first page, sorted by critics' score), it looks like only Hit Man, Challengers, and Furiosa - ranked 10th, 12th & 23rd, respectively - came from big studios. Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Fly Me to the Moon were both more popular with audiences than with critics, and it seems like everybody agrees that Despicable Me 4 was meh.

Conversely, box office seems to correlate almost perfectly with movies that were released by big-spending studios. Looking down Box Office Mojo's 2024 domestic box office list, which includes the name of the distributor, the Top 20 reads Disney, Warner Bros, Universal, Sony Pictures, Paramount, and MGM. It looks like Civil War from A24 might be the only movie in the Top 20 not released by one of the titans. So if anyone is swayed by big-spending movie studios, it seems like it's probably audiences, more than critics.

 

[Fippy]

Well Challengers i.e. supports my theory?

Challengers (2024) | Rotten Tomatoes

From visionary filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married to a champion on a losing streak (Mike Faist - West Side Story), Tashi's strategy for...

www.rottentomatoes.com

Remember that 15-20% are huge for movie ratings.
It's the difference when comparing super classics like LOTR and "just good / okay" films.

88% from critics would normally suggest an almost super classic, 90% + is cult potential category.
But we all suspect already Challengers isn't that.
73% or 7.1 on imdb from peoples - including Zendaya fans most likely.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Well Challengers i.e. supports my theory?

Inasmuch as a single piece of data ever suggests a trend, sure. That's called "cherry-picking." For instance, someone who wanted to make the opposite point - that professional critics dump on movies that regular moviegoers love - could point to the aforementioned Bad Boys: Ride or Die: Metacritic critics 54, audiences 74; Rotten Tomatoes critics 65, audiences 97. (Although, neither a 54 Metacritic score nor a 65 RT score constitutes "dumping on" a movie, so I'm both cherry-picking data and creating a straw-man argument. )

 

[Fippy]

I think the "sponsoring" doesn't just happen via critic reviews.
We prolly all have seen those dubious imdb "reviews", where new accounts rate something 9/10 and are never seen again.
Maybe that happened on RT with Bad Boys..

..in the end i dun care and you can win this argument

 

[Broken_Erika]

So this is Japan's take on Jack and the Beanstalk

 

[Clubber Lang]

 

[Kaitzilla]

Saw Twisters (2024) recently.

It was a good summer popcorn flick.
7 out of 10.

When I first saw the trailer for it, I thought someone made a parody of the 1996 Twister movie.

Confirmed my prejudice of the Dodge Ram pick-up truck as the most dangerous regular vehicle on the road.

Also, time to just write off Oklahoma.
No one should live there.

 

[Smellincoffee]

What Have I Done to Deserve This!, 1985. Pedro Almadovar. A....weird film about a Spanish housewife who tries to make ends meet as a cleaning lady, despite her grumpy husband's wishes. He's a taxi driver and a talented forger, but has some pride about being an honest man. He's also obessed with an older German he used to date, though oddly they use Sie on the phone instead of du. Grumpy and Housewife have two kids, a young teenager who apparently deals smack in Madrid and another young boy who is a male prostitute. As the film develops we witness the general suckitude of her life until she lets a dentist have her prostitute son (as in, just gives the boy to him), defends a neighbor's telekinetic daughter from her abusive mother (this is never further explored, the housewife is just 'Ah, cool, can you help me wallpaper my kitchen?'), kills her husband with a hambone, and is then deserted by her drug-dealer son and mother-in-law because they want to return to rural Spain and farm. Then the boy prostitute comes back and the movie ends. (shrug)

 

[Synobun]

Saw Transformers: Rise of the Beasts last night. Pretty mid, 6/10. The human casting was good, but the voice acting for the robots was off and they tried to fit too much into two hours. That's two movies now with the "new" universe and I have to say that while they are fine individually, they are particularly bad at offering a sense of continuity and overarching narrative. Also, TIL GI Joe is in the same universe as Transformers.

 

[Fippy]

I saw Runt (2019)
Okay but sort of drifts into lala land..need some teen collage drama tolerance. Nice dog.
Then i found out the main actor died the same year, only aged 20..and was shocked.

 

[Smellincoffee]

The Death of Stalin, 2017. Rewatch for me of a favorite film which takes the death of one of the most odious people who ever lived and turns it into a comedy about the viciousness and loathsomeness of politics. Arguably worth watching for the scenery porn and Jason Isaac's performance of Marshal Zhukov.