What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[throbber]

5 minutes ago, MONKMAN said:

Because we (wife and myself) thought we’d give it a watch just to see what all the hype was about, after seeing and reading various mixed reviews. It’s shite and I’ll certainly never watch it again. The film did its job though and made a shitload of cash. 

I can’t think of a film in all of history I would least like to watch than that. It looks genuinely offensive.

[MONKMAN]

3 minutes ago, throbber said:

It looks genuinely offensive.

It is.

[BFTD]

Barbie's worst crime is that it's really quite boring by the end, and a beginner's guide to lazy screenwriting in the second half. It's the absolute antithesis of "show, don't tell", and becomes as much of a polemic as Fahrenheit 9/11, which is presumably enough for some folk who feel oppressed and just want to righteously agree. 

However, it doesn't strike me that there's much to feel offended about, other than the lack of effort.

[throbber]

Not much to feel offended about? Look at it for goodness sake 

 

[BFTD]

4 minutes ago, throbber said:

Not much to feel offended about? Look at it for goodness sake 

 

Can't remember if you have any daughters, but you're in for a shock when you take them to Toys R Us!

(or whatever has replaced it)

[throbber]

7 minutes ago, BTFD said:

Can't remember if you have any daughters, but you're in for a shock when you take them to Toys R Us!

(or whatever has replaced it)

I don’t think there’s such a thing as toys r us, there is a smyths toys though. And yes I have a daughter. 

[Zetterlund]

5 minutes ago, BTFD said:

Can't remember if you have any daughters, but you're in for a shock when you take them to Toys R Us!

(or whatever has replaced it)

Toys Were Us, I think.

[Mark Connolly]

19 hours ago, JustOneCornetto said:

(68) T.I.M. (2023) - Netflix

Seemed right to watch this after M3gan as it’s all about an advanced robot who starts to have feelings for his host, Abi. Very much like a Black Mirror episode with near future tech stuff including driverless cars and a house with all the latest tech which TIM soon takes full control of and starts to find ways of splitting up Abi and her husband Paul. It all becomes very violent but it’s not a bad watch overall. 6/10

Reported for trying to get round the word filter, Big Team Found, etc

[Miguel Sanchez]

The Godfather (1972): Looked nice. I was with it up until the last part when Michael came back and the pacing went to hell. 

The Godfather Part II (1974): Boring and completely incomprehensible. De Niro does a decent impression of Marlon Brando. I'd like to think if I was the head of a Family I could find a more attractive and less annoying wife than Diane Keaton.

The Book of Eli (2010): Someone watched The Road, didn't read it, and thought "I'm going to make a film like that only more pretentious." The first half of this is Denzel Washington kicking f**k out of people and I still don't care.

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020): In the words of the director, this fixes the problems with the film. I hadn't seen the Godfathers and, well, I'm not in a rush to see them again. The very last scene of this is different from the original, and since I knew that was coming and felt robbed I went on youtube and watched the original. There was more emotion and sympathy in that than the previous nine hours I'd spent with Pacino and friends. 

The one thing I'm going to take from watching these is that Sofia Coppola is, by some distance, at least as far as I can remember (which isn't far tbf), the worst actor I have ever seen. An absolutely astonishingly out of her depth performance. 

[The Naitch]

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (Disney Plus)

8/10 - very decent way to round off the trilogy, glad I finally got round to watching it.

[MSU]

187 First Blood -- Well, I guess I'm watching Rambo movies this week. Why do I still know the words to the closing theme tune of this? WHY? Our introduction to one John J Rambo is a prime example of a 90-minute 1980s action movie. It's tight, it's thrilling, it's one man against the world, and its score is enough to get you punching the air at appropriate moments. I've always loved this movie and I loved it just as much for the 20th time as the actors have the good grace to follow along to the script that's also stored in my memory for some reason. As I get older, though, the exploding-shoebox-story ending becomes a little less satisfying, although it's still way better than the disregarded alternative I saw on YouTube. Rambo might still be a bit of a killing machine -- although his personal kill count here is (arguably) zero -- but he has corners and edges and layers and is all the better for it, especially as he demonstrates few of those nuances in future installments. Tod Kotcheff would go on to direct Weekend at Bernie's. 8/10

188 Rambo: First Blood Part II -- I remember watching this on video in 1986 with my parents AND a grandparent and we all LOVED it. Watching it now, it lacks the heart and depth of First Blood and with James Cameron's involvement in the script, it feels pretty formulaic as the pace and storyline rise and fall with Swiss-precision toward what is, admittedly, a pretty satisfying conclusion. Rambo kills a bucketload of Johnny Foreigners to make up for the poor bodycount in the previous movie which leaves no time for character development. Still, that 90 minute 1980s action movie thing still rings true and it's a pretty exciting watch if absolutely surface-level jingoism only. 6/10

189 Rambo III -- It says a lot that in a movie where Rambo joins the Mujahadeen -- awks -- that he has the worst haircut of them all. The most meager of set-ups positions Rambo against the pesky Ruskies with the leftover helicopters from Part 2, and has him play Sheepball with the rebels, which is quite fun, before going on to rescue Trautman who was stupid enough to get himself captured by the Soviets in the first place. If nothing else, it serves as a relevant tableau of the transient nature of foreign policy. How different this series could've been had Brian Dennehy just driven Rambo to a Tim Horton's in the first movie. 5/10

190 Rambo -- Starring, written by, and now directed by Mr Stallone. For the unprepared, this fourth installment of the Rambo saga is shockingly brutal and visceral. Living a quiet life in Thailand, Rambo is coaxed by a group of pesky Christian missionaries to take them upriver into Burma. When the do-gooders are captured, Rambo teams up with a group of mercenaries -- including the bloke who played Sally-shagger Chris in Coronation Street in the late 90s -- to rescue them from the horrible Burmese regime. Yet another rescue mission killing a new nationality doesn't, on paper, appear that different from the second and third outings, but the sheer bloodlust of the movie elevates it into uncharted territory and as a result, it's surprisingly enjoyable. Stallone directing does a decent job -- the man knows action movies -- and it's shot pretty well, especially when there aren't limbs and heads flying across the screen. Admittedly, this doesn't apply to a single second of the last 20 minutes where the bodycount seemed to be a target. 7/10

191 Rambo: Last Blood -- Is it fitting that a series that started as First Blood ends with Last Blood? Or is it a bit on the nose? The final installment actually starts off pretty promisingly, stereotypical names notwithstanding. Rambo is finally home, back living on his deceased father's ranch in Arizona where he inexplicably digs tunnels under his house, he's a friend to his father's Mexican housekeeper, Maria, and uncle to her granddaughter, Gabriela. When Gabriela learns of her estranged father's whereabouts in Mexico, she goes off to find him, against Rambo's wishes because of how horrible and dangerous Mexico is, and how it's full of drug cartels and human trafficking and wouldn't you know it, that's what Gabriela finds, leading Rambo to set off on one last rescue mission. The version of John Rambo at the start at least feels more in keeping with the Rambo from the original. He's unspeakably damaged, on meds, has tremors, the whole tunnel thing FFS, but any good work this does is quickly forgotten and I realized about halfway through, how despite all the furious bombastic gore of Rambo 4, it actually tied up the series very well. This undoes all that, and instead rests on a tired view of Mexico that played pretty well to a certain wall-building demographic in 2019. By the end, it doesn't even feel like a Rambo movie, it's kinda boring, and then it chickens out of the only thing that could've given the movie purpose, and the tunnels that 90 minutes earlier had harkened back to tunnels built by the Vietcong, turned into a subterranean gory Home Alone that isn't nearly as much fun as it should be. Rambo slaps cheeks with aftershave. Oh. 3/10

192 Freaky -- Well, I guess I'm a fan of Christopher Landon. Considering how bad this could've been, how mean-spirited it could've been, it's almost worth an extra half-star for how well it turned out. Freaky Friday the 13th manages to do what other Landon movies have done, but amps it up for a more adult audience. We're giving out no prizes for originality here but, as usual, his twist on a well-established trope is executed brilliantly. Full marks to Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton for the duel roles they play, particularly Vaughn who is hilarious as a 17-year-old girl, but both their little micro-expressions are so on point. The downside of most comedy-horror movies is that they aren't as funny as they should be and nor are they as scary as they should be and they struggle to find the right balance, but this came pretty close to the sweet spot for me. 8/10

193 A Haunting in Venice -- I watched this as God intended, on a massive IMAX screen, and I was going to joke that it's probably the movie least suited for such a grand projection, but in actual fact, it really suited it. There were many moments where the sweeping camera made me grab onto the side of my chair, which is nice because nothing much else in the movie came close to making me do so. A Haunting in Venice is very loosely based on Agatha Christie's Halloween Party and veers far more drastically from the source material than Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile did, and to be honest, it suffers a bit from it. There's a reason why people are still making adaptations of Agatha Christie's work: she knew what she was doing. Hercule Poirot is called out of retirement by author Ariadne Oliver, Tina Fey, to debunk Michelle Yeoh's medium, Joyce Reynolds, at a decaying, haunted Venetian mansion where the owner's daughter had recently been driven mad and committed suicide. When Reynolds herself dies in mysterious circumstances and an attempt is made on Poirot's life, he's forced to put his skills of deduction to use again while surrounded by supposed ghosts. Kenneth Branagh is, as usual, rather magnificent as Poirot, but Yeoh is underused and Fey feels miscast and the story rarely broadens in interesting directions. The scenery and surroundings look less CGId than previous movies, but it's edited quite poorly which left the ending underwhelming and the sense that not all the loose ends have been tidied up. 5/10

194 Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates -- I was surprised to see that this movie was from 2016 as it felt more 2006 on this rewatch. I remembered very little from the first viewing, and it's okay, I guess. There are a few decent moments and a couple of chuckles but it's a comedy far too weighed down by its own conceit so that by about halfway, it's as good as done. Anna Kendrick was great in a what-would-happen-if-Pitch-Perfect-smoked-meth type way, and actually the main cast is mostly all better than the movie. The problem lies in a patchy, uneven script by writers who would go on to do slightly better with The House in the following year. 5/10

[accies1874]

Freaky is just tremendous fun. It does pretty much everything right for a film of its ilk. 

I'm not sure if I've liked either of Branagh's Agatha Christie films (I definitely didn't like Death on the Nile, and that was before this week's news!) but I'm gonna keep coming back for them.

[coprolite]

Jurassic World (2015)

CG dinosaurs, improbable action, shit attempts to introduce some emotion. Just enough action to hold attention. 

4/10

Jurassic World- Fallen Kingdom (2018)

More CGI dinosaurs. Much better baddies, even more improbable action (lava/physics). The velociraptor being a goodie strangely reminded me of terminator sequels. 

5/10 - insufficient encouragement to fork out for the third one. Will wait for freebie. 

The Killing (1956)

Heist caper. Auteured by Kubric, apparently before he had the budgetary clout to hire decent actors. Also appears to pre-date him finding his style. 

Still enjoyable enough.

A convoluted plan to rob a racetrack by a mismatched crew is told by a series of flashbacks out of sequence.  I wasn't a fan of the voice over but i got properly drawn in.  There were aspects of it that felt very modern, but the music kept reminding me it was from the 50s.

The acting was, apart from the main character and a femme fatale, pretty dire. The plot wasn't quite clever or suspenseful enough for a classic heist movie. 

6/10

[Jupiter Jazz]

10 hours ago, coprolite said:

Jurassic World (2015)

CG dinosaurs, improbable action, shit attempts to introduce some emotion. Just enough action to hold attention. 

4/10

Jurassic World- Fallen Kingdom (2018)

More CGI dinosaurs. Much better baddies, even more improbable action (lava/physics). The velociraptor being a goodie strangely reminded me of terminator sequels. 

5/10 - insufficient encouragement to fork out for the third one. Will wait for freebie. 

The Killing (1956)

Heist caper. Auteured by Kubric, apparently before he had the budgetary clout to hire decent actors. Also appears to pre-date him finding his style. 

Still enjoyable enough.

A convoluted plan to rob a racetrack by a mismatched crew is told by a series of flashbacks out of sequence.  I wasn't a fan of the voice over but i got properly drawn in.  There were aspects of it that felt very modern, but the music kept reminding me it was from the 50s.

The acting was, apart from the main character and a femme fatale, pretty dire. The plot wasn't quite clever or suspenseful enough for a classic heist movie. 

6/10

The Killing is Kubrick's first masterpiece IMO.

[Ewanandmoreagain]

On 16/09/2023 at 22:42, Miguel Sanchez said:

 

The Godfather Part II (1974): Boring and completely incomprehensible. De Niro does a decent impression of Marlon Brando. I'd like to think if I was the head of a Family I could find a more attractive and less annoying wife than Diane Keaton.

I disagree. I think it is mesmerising and , crime does not pay !

when Michael is alone at the end of the film having had Fredo murdered ( Sonny already dead ) , Diane Keaton has left him and had an abortion and fallen out with Tom Hagen.

However , as someone has said , the attempted murder of Michael and Diane ( and Fredo"s exact role ) is rather murky.

Michael met Diane when he was in the armed forces !

 

 

[DA Baracus]

Barbie

 

After seeing the polemic on here I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. Thought it was quite funny and laughed quite often throughout. Mixed up the humour, from some puerile jokes (the hardly subtle wanking Kens off joke) to some more outright chuckles (the final scene/joke of the film) and some in-between. The voice over was quite humorous.

Had some surpringsly emotional bits too.

Was worried at first, as the opening stuff in Barbieworld has me going "Eh?!" and was thinking I'd made a mistake putting it on (didn't pay for it; PM me for details), but thankfully that was over fairly quick and then the film 'opened up' so to speak.

I thought it was often daft as f**k but knowingly so. 

Here's a teaser for you; is this a Will Ferrell 'companion piece' to Elf?* In Elf he travels to the 'real world' and here he does the opposite.

 

 

*

No, it isn't

[MSU]

195 Outlaw Johnny Black -- A 90 minute movie if ever there was one, cram packed into a 130 minute runtime. Michael Jai White directed, co-wrote and stars in this comedic nod to blaxploitation movies and spaghetti westerns of the 70s, filmed on grainy stock, filled with ridiculous zooms, horse stunts, flashbacks, and a taste for revenge. We find the titular Outlaw Johnny Black on his way to take out the scoundrel who killed his father but he's thrown off course when he rescues a Native American couple, is wrongfully arrested, escapes on the lam, and winds up impersonating a preacher he assumes to be dead, in a town already full of corruption. Michael Jai White is a compelling enough presence but the movie really lacks focus and is too easily distracted by dull side stories and tonally it's all over the place. There's quite a bit of punching down in the direction of Native Americans that suspect Mel Brooks would've thought twice about. Contrary, though, to other things I watched this week, it all comes together pretty well in a third act. Tip of the hat in any event as it looks like White crowd-funded at least some of the budget he used here. A pickier editor could've saved him a bunch. 5/10

196 A Simple Favor -- It's impossible to ignore the Gone Girl vibes but it's not necessarily a bad thing and it's fun to watch Anna Kendrick's character develop from a mousy, Connecticut single-mom to Nancy Drew to a bit of a badass. Meanwhile, Blake Lively is wonderful as the mysterious PR executive who befriends Kendrick before going missing and Henry Golding is good as the husband who you know is about to get set up for something if he isn't behind it all in the first place. It's funny and kinda endearing it does such a good job in the set-up that maybe it was always going to disappoint by the end. 7/10

197 50/50 -- Joseph Gordon-Levitt is quite excellent in this heartfelt comedy about 27-year-old Adam who discovers he has an aggressive form of spinal cancer and only a 50% chance of survival. Will Reiser's story is careful to tell Adam's story realistically but where it really excels is how this affects the people around him. Kyle, Seth Rogan, is his best friend who masks his fears with jokes and chasing tail. His mother, Anjelica Huston, is dealing with a husband with dementia and a son who refuses to talk to her. And then there's Anna Kendrick as Adam's therapist. It gets a little too neat and fancy and sugary towards the end, and perhaps Jonathan Levine could've resisted sticking his thumb down to make such a pretty bow, but the chemistry between Gordon-Levitt and Rogan, as well as the overarching message, makes this a surprisingly feelgood affair. 8/10

198 It Lives Inside -- A Hindi horror movie on paper at least sounds like it might bring something new to the genre and for a while it does.  We're introduced to Samidha, a young Indian girl living somewhere pointedly unnamed in North America with her parents. She prefers to be known as Sami, to speak English around the house much to the annoyance of her mother in particular, to shave her arms, and who associates with the white kids at school at the expense of her former best friend and fellow immigrant, Tamira. Tamira seems to be having some problems of her own, looks like she hasn't washed or slept in forever, and carries a dingy glass jar around with her wherever she goes. When Tamira approaches Sami for help, the jar is broken and it's all downhill for Tamira after that. Writer and director Bishal Dutta borrows heavily from Indian demonic mythology and his own immigration story and for the first hour or so, it was a compelling tale. The monster lingering in the shadows isn't winning any originality awards, but with the Indian spin, it felt renewed as these poor kids avoided the demon spirit determined to drive them crazy and consume them. There's a strong focus on meals, and sharing food, and offerings, and prayer all going hand in hand and I found all that fascinating, helped along by the performances of Megan Suri as Sami and Neeru Bajwa as her mother Poorna. For long periods, Poorna is in her own horror movie as she battles with a daughter who does everything she can to reject her heritage and culture. Sadly, though, it all falls to pieces in the third act where the old adage of the monster only being scary when you don't see it is proved to be true, and the whole thing becomes horribly rushed and the strength and power of the premise is diluted. It was never much of a scary movie in the first place, but it was spooky, and the last twenty minutes seemed to be in too much of a hurry to finish in five. 6/10

[accies1874]

38. Past Lives - Cinema

I've seen this a couple of times and thought it was good the first time but absolutely brilliant the second. 

The first 5/10 minutes sets up everything: the characteristics and motivations of the two leads, and the ideas of fate and diverging paths. It also sets up the tone of the film with a lot of weighted subtext and visual metaphors, the main one being the admittedly on-the-nose image of Nora going up the steep steps to a higher point with Hae Sung setting off on a rising path with an undetermined endpoint. Their respective journeys - both what we see in the film and what is alluded to - are really interesting and could well be the driving force behind the relationship.

It is such a visual film. The performances are obviously given a lot of the spotlight. It's a shame that the subtitles can distract from them, which is by no means anyone's fault, but I reckon an English speaker could have as clear an understanding of Nora and Hae Sung's motivations without the subtitles simply due to how much the two leads are able to convey in their interactions. However it was the visual storytelling that stood out to me, particularly how it boxes characters in the frame, often giving one, two or three of them a tiny amount of space within a third and telling its story through who or what is in that space. There are mirrors, screens, lighting and other environmental means of making this work which both looks great and provides information. One scene that stands out to me is when Nora is brushing her teeth with her husband elsewhere in the bathroom, but the way it's shot has two different stories going on within the one frame. I found it fascinating and it visually articulates a lot of things that I'm struggling to convey here. It's the kind of film that taps into emotions through indescribable ways, which I most found to be true through the Hae Sung character - how he interacts with Nora and his stilted conversations with Arthur touched me in ways I don't really understand. There's a sort of touching despondency to the whole film. 

At first it felt like a slow mover that hits you in retrospect once the credits roll, but on rewatch, with a clearer understanding of what was going on, there is so much packed into the dialogue, performances and cinematography about these two characters and the attraction between them - the uncertain futures, the unspoken present and the unreliable pasts. It's actually really similar to Everything Everywhere All at Once, only if that film didn't have the multiverse. Both have similar ideas about a life unlived, however due to Past Lives being grounded in reality, that idea becomes much bleaker for the characters as the only way they can explore their alternative lives is through their own imagination based on the only life they've got. Characters being defined by their choices is a pretty common idea, but this explicitly draws attention to every choice made and how one different decision could result in an entirely different life for Nora and Hae Sung - and, subsequently, an entirely different film for us. 

There are also pretty bleak thoughts about relationships for people who value control of their own lives (again relating to fate) and whether control and loneliness go hand-in-hand. When I first watched Arthur and Nora's introduction as a married couple, I initially thought it was setting him up as a controlling dickhead due to the fact he's doing the talking for her to the border force dude, but the rewatch made me reconsider it from the point of view that what could've been a happy ending in a different is here just another blow to Nora's struggles with identity. It's really just a natural compromise of marriage, but everything we'd learned about her up to that point suggested that she wouldn't be happy with that. 

South Korean filmmakers just keep producing must-see cinema these past few years. Burning was my favourite of 2019 and one of my favourites of the decade, Parasite was an insta-classic, Decision to Leave was excellent in pretty much every way even if it didn't completely click with me, and now Past Lives is loved by all. There will be others that I've other forgotten about or didn't see too. 

My second showing was made even better by, for the second time this year, being treated to an empty screening. It was fucking freezing due to being the first showing of the day, and it wasn't even open when I turned up, but it was very much worth it for a great experience. 

[scottsdad]

On 23/09/2023 at 19:34, DA Baracus said:

Barbie

 

After seeing the polemic on here I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. Thought it was quite funny and laughed quite often throughout. Mixed up the humour, from some puerile jokes (the hardly subtle wanking Kens off joke) to some more outright chuckles (the final scene/joke of the film) and some in-between. The voice over was quite humorous.

Had some surpringsly emotional bits too.

Was worried at first, as the opening stuff in Barbieworld has me going "Eh?!" and was thinking I'd made a mistake putting it on (didn't pay for it; PM me for details), but thankfully that was over fairly quick and then the film 'opened up' so to speak.

I thought it was often daft as f**k but knowingly so. 

Here's a teaser for you; is this a Will Ferrell 'companion piece' to Elf?* In Elf he travels to the 'real world' and here he does the opposite.

 

 

*

  Reveal hidden contents

No, it isn't

 

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish. 

[Mark Connolly]

4 hours ago, scottsdad said:

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish.