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Which movie did you watch today and how would you rate it?

DrZoidberg said:
James Brown said:
Where would Primer fall in your list?
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Haven't seen it. Should I?
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the reason you should see primer is that it's an a-movie that was made for $7000. won all kinds of sundance. death to hollywood. it's not really a time travel movie...but there's one scene, when they're up watching the storage units with binoculars, that was flat out cosmic horror and gave me the creeps. it's DEEP.

here's a nice movie narrative chart, along with ones for starwars, lotr and jurrassic park, via xkcd.
 
the wailing

link to trailer

'the wailing' is a high brow korean horror flick that's getting a lot of attention, so i gave it a show. problem - unless you are dyed in the wool korean, and i'm not talking about any nijin korean-american, you haven't a prayer of actually understanding what's going on. it is still entertaining, and well made....but afterwards i watched a youtube 'the wailing explained' bit and apparently i missed everything. i really wanted the old japanese man to be a good guy...not satan. i got the vibe of the korean shaman being sketchy...but in league with the japanese devil? and how the hell am i supposed to know the weird girl is a genius locus? damn.......
 
Jolly_Penguin said:
I watched the classic sci fi movie "the day the earth stood still" and it was actually very good. Way better than the remake they did with Keanu Reves (which totally jumped the shark and made no sense).
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You know it's a Biblical analogy? The alien is Jesus.
 
DrZoidberg said:
Jolly_Penguin said:
I watched the classic sci fi movie "the day the earth stood still" and it was actually very good. Way better than the remake they did with Keanu Reves (which totally jumped the shark and made no sense).
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You know it's a Biblical analogy? The alien is Jesus.
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why is it that hollywood has decided keanu reeves looks like a messiah? that, the matrix, little buddha, constantine......
 


apparently daniel radcliffe has all the money he will ever need and is now devoting himself to art film esoterica. this passes surreal, does not collect $200 and goes straight to dada. i liked 'horns'. but swiss army man, while watchable, is a serious mind fuck. what the hell? this is the new movie to watch on drugs. not pot, i mean serious shit, like candy flipping on acid and pcp. yeah.....
 
It's like he's in a competition with Elijah Wood to take the weirdest roles by a former fantasy blockbuster star.
 
Nina 4/10

Yet another film of a famous person that in reality is just an excuse to show off mental illness. In this case the bipolar condition of Nina Simone. The film assumed that the viewer already is familiar with her life. I wasn't. I only knew her by having heard a couple of her songs. The start of the film rushes ahead through her life to the very end of her life. But it doesn't start at the end and show flash backs. Well... sort of. It was mostly just a confusing mess and I had no fucking clue what her career was like up to the end (where the film begins). The first concert she does is in a small bar. So as a viewer I'm like, ok, so this is the kind of concerts she had. And then I'm told she is one of the most famous singers. Ok, so why is she in a small bar performing if she is so famous? And then somebody says that she should be in a huge concert hall, and not in a small bar. And I'm like, yes, so why isn't she? Please tell me, the viewer. No information.

The film revolves around her (non-romantic) relationship with her nurse/assistant/manager. This is uninteresting. It never goes anywhere and there's very little tension. I suspect it's just badly acted. David Oyelowo plays the assistant. I had never heard of him. So I looked him up. He has a long career of so-so stuff. So he doesn't seem particularly talented. He seems to be established as a middling talent. So it's an odd casting. It seems to me like he just didn't have what it took to make this role work.

Zoe Saldana plays Nina Simone. This is also not particularly interesting. But I don't think it's the acting that's the problem. I suspect the problem here is the script. A string of scenes showing a crazy person doing crazy things is not interesting. This is not a comedy. The craziness has to be coupled with her being sensible sometimes. There has to be some sort of balance. Nina Simone in this film goes from being disturbingly weird to being bouncing-off-the-walls-in-a-padded-cell-crazy. She's impossible to like. But she's famous for being a musical genius. She created amazing music and trail-blazed against all odds and conquered the world. This is not shown in this film. Nina Simone in this film is just nuts with no redeeming qualities. It's the stuff that made her famous that I'm interested in. This film provides none of it.

They use the Angry Black Woman trope to it's fullest extent. Sure, Nina Simone does have ample reason to be angry. But this character seems utterly consumed by it. It's like she has nothing else going for her in her life.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SassyBlackWoman

It would be nice with a film about a historical black person that doesn't focus on how much a victim he or she is. I'm not saying that black people historically haven't suffered. What I'm saying is that, by looking at the movies produced focusing on black people, black history seems to be defined by being a victim and nothing else. I'm starting to find this tedious. And in this film it's especially obvious, since her talents are so down-played.

I learned almost nothing about Nina Simone's music career.
 
I watched a classic yesterday: The Thin Man 8/10

While ostensibly a murder mystery, the real attraction is the husband/wife relationship of the retired detective and his new young wife who wants to see him solve a crime, an opportunity he gets when an old friend of his (or whatever) gets suspected of murder. The detective of course resists getting back into it, but his wife's enthusiasm plus everyone else's begging gets him back into it. And everyone drinks. A lot.
 
Jeremiah Johnson - 8/10

Held up quite well after all these years, but not really true to story the actual mountain man, Jack Johnson.

The movie is closer to the novel by Vardis Fisher.
 
Sarpedon said:
I watched a classic yesterday: The Thin Man 8/10

While ostensibly a murder mystery, the real attraction is the husband/wife relationship of the retired detective and his new young wife who wants to see him solve a crime, an opportunity he gets when an old friend of his (or whatever) gets suspected of murder. The detective of course resists getting back into it, but his wife's enthusiasm plus everyone else's begging gets him back into it. And everyone drinks. A lot.
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They're all enjoyable as hell.

The dialogue and comic timing are masterful.

There was some scary talk a few years ago of Johnny Depp remaking the series...whew! I'm glad that got dropped.

Don't fix something that ain't broke.
 
I also saw Nightwatching 7/10, a film in which Bilbo Baggins plays Rembrandt. It centers around the supposed intrigue that supposedly swirled around his famous painting Nightwatchers, a satirical painting of a bunch of Dutch militia dudes. The main attraction of this film is that every scene is set and lit like a painting from the dutch masters (not limited to Rembrandt himself) and many directly allude to famous paintings. The plot of the story is less significant, being a typical man-child story about an artist who is reluctant to do what he's supposed to, loses his wife, has an affair and then marries his much younger servant girl and gets his life threatened by a bunch of angry men with muskets and enormous lace collars, who ride a horse through his kitchen and break his painting props. There's a gross subplot involving an orphanage that is also a brothel, and a murder mystery.
 
Dr Strange 7/10

Origin story that introduces magic to the Marvel cinematic universe. Good, but not great.

The villain was a bit less weak than a normal Marvel film, but unfortunately, everything else felt like a cookie-cutter Marvel film. It doesn't help that Stephen Strange has a story arc that is very similar to the story arc of the movie version of Tony Stark.

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bleubird said:
Star Trek Beyond
Very entertaining.Good story and action.
7.8
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As a sci-fi action movie it was very good. Unfortunately, it still feels like Star Wars instead of Star Trek to me. I really loved the new character.
 
Thomas II said:
Has anybody seen "Hacksaw Ridge" by Mel Gibson?
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Not really.

Look, I get that his politics don't really affect how good or bad he is at his art, but watching one of his movies right now would serve as a very unpleasant reminder that we have a fascist running for president who has a chance of being elected.
 
Thomas II said:
Has anybody seen "Hacksaw Ridge" by Mel Gibson?
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Kind of on the fence about this one. While I can, in theory, support conscientious objectors, in reality, WW2 was never a more clear example of bad guys versus good guys in war and the main character Doss STILL couldn't bring himself to fight?

I can understand conscientious objectors in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, any of a myriad of Far East, near East and Middle East wars because of the muddy goals and aims and politics, but WW2?

Yeah, I really can't get behind Doss in this situation since his ability to stand on the high moral ground was being supported by the men who were willing to fight for his freedom to do that but he wasn't.
 
Underseer said:
bleubird said:
Star Trek Beyond
Very entertaining.Good story and action.
7.8
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As a sci-fi action movie it was very good. Unfortunately, it still feels like Star Wars instead of Star Trek to me. I really loved the new character.
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Really? I thought it was the worst of the reboots.

All 3 movies have been revenge movies.

A motorcycle that works after sitting for a century? Does it not need air in the tires?

Alien thugs who couldn't remember where a ship crashed, invisible or not? And decide to live in a rough camp instead of a still working starship?

Rock n roll saves the day? Really?

A poorly designed space station that has no way of reaching debris that might enter its docking system that reaches into the LIVING AREAS of a sealed system?

Wow. Bad all the way around.
 
credoconsolans said:
Thomas II said:
Has anybody seen "Hacksaw Ridge" by Mel Gibson?
Click to expand...

Kind of on the fence about this one. While I can, in theory, support conscientious objectors, in reality, WW2 was never a more clear example of bad guys versus good guys in war and the main character Doss STILL couldn't bring himself to fight?

I can understand conscientious objectors in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, any of a myriad of Far East, near East and Middle East wars because of the muddy goals and aims and politics, but WW2?

Yeah, I really can't get behind Doss in this situation since his ability to stand on the high moral ground was being supported by the men who were willing to fight for his freedom to do that but he wasn't.
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I dunno. The Western European theatre was a pretty clear-cut conflict of the kind you claim; but it was a tiny part of the whole - in Europe, WWII was Hitler vs Stalin, which is not a choice with a clearly good side to fight for.

Similarly, in the Pacific theatre, Imperial Japan was an ugly regime; but its opponents were largely exploitative colonial powers and/or Maoist communists. I'm not sure that there is a really positive choice there either.

I think Hitler and Tojo needed to lose; but I can also understand why someone might feel that supporting Stalin or Mao, or even the colonial ambitions of Britain and the USA, was not a moral imperative.

This is particularly true given the power of propaganda. It's easy to look back 70 years and see the big picture; but at the time, who knew what was truth, and what was a big lie?

Rumours of Hitler's extermination camps turned out to be true. But in 1914, rumours of Germans systematically raping nuns and eating babies were widely believed, but false. It's a lot easier to pick a side now, with the benefit of hindsight.
 
Eastern Promises, 7/10: Stars Viggo Mortenson and Naomi Watts in a crime thriller about the Russian mafia in London. The crime ring is headed by a father and very unstable son and Viggo plays the part of the driver and clean up guy for murders. The crime ring does a bit if human trafficking of prostitutes and one of the girls, heavily pregnant, escapes and collapses in a chemist. She dies but the child survives and the midwife (Naomi Watts) attempts to track down the girl's family. And so she enters the murky underworld of the Russian mafia. The plot is pretty good and there is a fair bit of tension throughout the movie with some gory scenes of violence and is well filmed for atmosphere. Worth a watch.
 
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