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

[TSwizzle]

Companion

This is an excellent movie about AI machines made to look and act like humans. It's been done many times, but only this and Ex Machina have so well captured the potential for use, abuse, and consequences of these potential eventualities.

I could give a lot of details, but when I think a movie is really worth seeing, I don't want to even hint at possible spoilers.

See it.

8.5/10

Companion is an entertaining, interesting and thought provoking movie. I’ll give it a 7/10.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

Absentia

Wife's husband mysteriously goes missing for 7 years. Apparently after that amount of time, at least according to the movie, you can have someone declared "Dead in Absentia." Weird things ensue.

This is a low budget horror flick and one of Mike Flanagan's early efforts. It's interesting to see the early works from someone who is now widely considered to be one of the genre's best. The pieces are all there for a good movie, but overall it's poorly put together.

The two female leads are good, but the rest of the cast is bordering on MST3K/Rifftrax awful, and the scenes with those bad actors cause what the kids today refer to as "Secondhand Embarrassment."

If you like Flanagan's current work, this may be interesting to you. If not, then give it a miss.

4/10

 

[Swammerdami]

Blow Up (1966), a "psychological thriller/mystery." Critics gave this weird movie rave reviews:

... "a mod masterpiece"; "as important and seminal a film as Citizen Kane, Open City, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour – perhaps even more so"; a "far-out, uptight and vibrantly exciting picture" that represented a "screeching change of creative direction ... [it will] undoubtedly be by far the most popular movie Antonioni has ever made".

Bosley Crowther, film critic of The New York Times, called it a "fascinating picture",[6] but expressed reservations, describing the "usual Antonioni passages of seemingly endless wanderings" as "redundant and long"; nevertheless, he called Blow-up a "stunning picture – beautifully built up with glowing images and color compositions that get us into the feelings of our man and into the characteristics of the mod world in which he dwells".[6] Even director Ingmar Bergman, who generally disliked Antonioni's work, called the film a masterpiece

Maybe I don't cope with subtlety or "art," but I found it entirely pointless. It's unapologetic haphazardness reminded me a bit of Mulholland Drive, but that film was a hundred times more interesting than Blow Up. It gets 7.4 IMDB but I'll give it 4.9. I expect connoisseurs to call me a tasteless vulgarian -- have at me!

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Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), sci-fi thriller. I watched this 55 years ago, but remembered very little of it. Briefly, an AI takes over the world! Nerds will find much to complain about in a very old movie about high tech. But it was quite a prophecy 55 years ago and is eerily topical today, so I'll agree with its 7.1 IMDB rating.

 

[Swammerdami]

Recently I also watched The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), a sentimental drama based loosely on a true story, and starring Ingrid Bergman. I think my mother took me to see it when I was 8 years old. I remembered only the tiniest piece of it; but thought of it for some reason, and found it free to view on YouTube. It's very slow-moving -- you may give up on the tedious beginning -- but I'm a sucker for sentimental romance. Its IMDB rating is 7.2 and (if you can tolerate its tediousness) it's worth almost that much.

As I watched I thought of easy script changes that would jerk tears, but maybe its nonchalant script has the merit of realism.

 

[Tharmas]

Maybe I don't cope with subtlety or "art," but I found it entirely pointless. It's unapologetic haphazardness reminded me a bit of Mulholland Drive, but that film was a hundred times more interesting than Blow Up. It gets 7.4 IMDB but I'll give it 4.9. I expect connoisseurs to call me a tasteless vulgarian -- have at me!

I saw Blow Up when it first came out, say 1967. I was a student in college. I remember liking it OK, but I don't remember much about it today, and I'm not inclined to watch it again. So, sorry, put me down as no opinion.

 

[Tharmas]

Maybe I don't cope with subtlety or "art," but I found it entirely pointless. It's unapologetic haphazardness reminded me a bit of Mulholland Drive, but that film was a hundred times more interesting than Blow Up. It gets 7.4 IMDB but I'll give it 4.9. I expect connoisseurs to call me a tasteless vulgarian -- have at me!

When I was a young man, high school and college, I was into European “art films.” Bergman of course, and Fellini, Godard, etc. As I said above, Antonioni’s Blow Up was OK. I don’t remember it well and am sort of “meh” about it. On the other hand, I found his Red Desert to be unforgivably boring. I'm not really a film buff and have a very haphazard record of what I've seen and haven't seen, but that's my 2 cents.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Thunderbolts - Continuing on the Marvel series of films, whether people like it or not (and of course, they all stopped liking it before anyone else did), we get the Marvel brand of Suicide Squad. This film pairs a bunch of characters from other things, Black Widow, Falcon and Winter Soldier, Antman and the Wasp, Hawkeye into a predictable by unstable team. This is effectively The Avengers reimagined just with a bit more character development as these anti-heroes generally need to reclaim a piece of what they were, even if they don't remember it. The fact that this has more character development helped provide breathing space in the film to help it need to overly rely on action sequences to pull the movie through. It has the typical Marvel camp, but while covering a darker (by Marvel standards) hopelessness across most of the team. Typical plot hole issues and maybe some plot twists that are too convenient, but generally very enjoyable film. The film ran a good length, and unlike Captain America, wasn't ready for the ending before the "climatic" fight scene.

3 of 4

 

[Colonel Sanders]

Regression

I really had to get on Amazon Prime to remember this movie's title. With Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, how bad could it be, right? Maybe they have the same agent who told them both not to read the script before taking the job.

It's boring beyond description.

Oh, what happens? There's something about possession and yaddayaddayadda. It tries to be gritty and shocking, and the subject matter is, but god, it's so dull. Oh, and the dialogue is fucking painful. Hawke's a legitimately good actor and I think Watson is too, but the best aspects of their respective performances is being able to keep a straight face or not collapse from embarrassment while uttering their lines.

I gave this one a solid 40 minutes, which was 25 minutes too long. Even a Neil Breen epic can hold my attention longer.

3/10 (Breen has his own scale)

 

[unapologetic]

"I Am Not A Robot" (2023) 23 minutes

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19837932/?ref_=tt_mlt_i_4
What happens when a lady takes the cathpa test in the Netherlands.
There are 3 other films with the same name, differant plot.
8/10

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Speaking of zombie movies...

Warm Bodies

A zombie starts regaining his humanity. He saves his pre-zombie girlfriend from other zombies and they rekindle their relationship.

It was a surprisingly heartwarming film watching the zombie's relationship with the ex as his humanity is returning and other zombies are inspired by the protagonist to redevelop their humanity.

Rotton Tomatoes gives it an 81. I'd go 75.

Have we discussed The Girl With All the Gifts here?

Wonderful zombie movie, and the book was even better.

 

[The Colourful Jester]

Has anyone seen Megalopolis?

That is statistically unlikely.

Well, the fraction has moved ever so slightly now. I bought the bluray.
After watching it, I spent 30 minutes on ChatGPT about what it was about in terms of themes.
I enjoyed it, but I've no idea what the movie as a whole is about. Might watch it again now.

 

[unapologetic]

Have we discussed The Girl With All the Gifts here?

I mentioned it in December but no one responded.
/page-297#post-1250771

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Just read that. I'd give it an 8, too.

 

[Ford]

It was a slow day at work yesterday (our little delivery robots can't operate in rain yet) and so I watched a couple movies on Max (one of our perks is a free basic subscription):

The Matrix: Resurrections. I'd avoided it because of the negative reception, but after watching it I didn't really see what all the fuss was about. It wasn't great, but it wasn't any worse than the last movie in the original trilogy. It's almost as if the Wachowskis said "oh, the studio really, really, really wants another Matrix movie? Fine. We're going to re-cast basically everyone except Neo and Trinity, go one level deeper into the Matrix, and make self-(ir)reverent references to the original. It's not stealing if it was your idea in the first place, right?" It was less a ripoff of the source material (I'm looking at you, Star Wars The Force Awakens) and more a "I see what you did there" popcorn flick. It was fun.

Fahrenheit 451. No, not the classic Francois Truffaut movie (which I've watched many times) but HBO's modern take starring/produced by Michael B Jordan.. I'm all for adapting/updating classic material for the modern age, but this just fell flat on so many levels. Jordan is good given the right material (Killmonger in Black Panther, for example) but he was just flat here, and it didn't help that he shared a lot of screen time with the scene-chewing Michael Shannon as Captain Beatty, and the absolutely captivating Sofia Boutella as his contact in the underground.

They also didn't do a very good job of explaining how "books" could be banned/burned in the age of the internet (or as they call it, "The Nine.") Yes, the firemen burn piles of books, but also piles of (apparently) 90's era desktop computers? Then in a movie that's supposed to be set about 2 generations from today, Montag pulls up to his apartment in a current Dodge Challenger. Is he into classic cars? This movie is a hot mess on so many levels.

 

[Shadowy Man]

It wasn't great, but it wasn't any worse than the last movie in the original trilogy.

Well, thats a pretty low bar.

The best thing I can say about Matrix 3 was that it made me realize how good a movie Matrix 2 was.

 

[James Brown]

The best thing I can say about Matrix 3 was that it made me realize how good a movie Matrix 2 was.

Curious. That's the same thing I say about Matrix 2 with regard to Matrix 1.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The best thing I can say about Matrix 3 was that it made me realize how good a movie Matrix 2 was.

Curious. That's the same thing I say about Matrix 2 with regard to Matrix 1.

I was pretty comfortable considering Matrix 1 to be a good movie even without the context of Matrix 2, which I wasn’t particularly impressed with until I saw Matrix 3.

 

[Ford]

The best thing I can say about Matrix 3 was that it made me realize how good a movie Matrix 2 was.

Curious. That's the same thing I say about Matrix 2 with regard to Matrix 1.

I was pretty comfortable considering Matrix 1 to be a good movie even without the context of Matrix 2, which I wasn’t particularly impressed with until I saw Matrix 3.

Interesting.

I thought both the sequels kind of lost the narrative to a certain degree. Like the fight between Neo and a whole bunch of Agent Smith clones, it was as if they looked at the focus groups and said "people want more kung fu fights with more Agent Smith and techno music" and amped it up by a factor of 100. Then the next film amped it up by 1000.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The best thing I can say about Matrix 3 was that it made me realize how good a movie Matrix 2 was.

Curious. That's the same thing I say about Matrix 2 with regard to Matrix 1.

I was pretty comfortable considering Matrix 1 to be a good movie even without the context of Matrix 2, which I wasn’t particularly impressed with until I saw Matrix 3.

Interesting.

I thought both the sequels kind of lost the narrative to a certain degree. Like the fight between Neo and a whole bunch of Agent Smith clones, it was as if they looked at the focus groups and said "people want more kung fu fights with more Agent Smith and techno music" and amped it up by a factor of 100. Then the next film amped it up by 1000.

Agreed. Thats why 3 made 2 look good in comparison.

 

[ZiprHead]

I liked the first one. It was an interesting science fiction concept brought to the screen with a certain style. And Hugo Weaving, say no more.

The two sequels blew chunks.