What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Mark Connolly]

4 hours ago, scottsdad said:

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish. 

[velo army]

9 hours ago, scottsdad said:

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish. 

This is the post of a man with children. Children who loved this movie and watched it repeatedly and relentlessly each Christmas, driving our favourite Academic grass demented.

[mathematics]

On 25/09/2023 at 13:01, scottsdad said:

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish. 

Fucking boo.

[scottsdad]

13 minutes ago, mathematics said:

Fucking boo.

[Mark Connolly]

On 25/09/2023 at 22:37, velo army said:

This is the post of a man with children. Children who loved this movie and watched it repeatedly and relentlessly each Christmas, driving our favourite Academic grass demented.

He must be a South Pole elf

[Ewanandmoreagain]

 

" The Stranger "

1946 film noir , and it has dated a bit.

Nazi war criminal hiding in the US of A.

Stars Orson Welles and Edward G Robinson.

Spoiler

Eddie is a good guy

 

 

[pozbaird]

Just watched the 4k digitally restored Blu Ray of ‘Gregory’s Girl’. Just wonderful, absolutely bloody wonderful film. I am the same age as the cast, went to school at the same time as the cast, can identify with many of the teenage themes of the film, and also now live in Cumbernauld, so am familiar with many of the locations. Even allowing for that, it’s just a wonderful film. Will always be in my Top 5 movies of all time, only trumped for No 1 spot by the original ‘12 Angry Men’.

Edited September 27, 2023 by pozbaird

[Ewanandmoreagain]

Morituri.

Marlon and Yul , Yul and Marlon.

Marlon and his accent(s)

Ex German forces Marlon blackmailed by Trevor Howard !

into working for British intelligence. He impersonates a SS officer and joins a boat which is smuggling rubber from Japan to Germany . M. starts to sabotage the scuttling charges so the valuable cargo can be grabbed by the Allies . He finds that some of the crew are anti Nazi and may be prepared to help him.

The ship meets up with an Axis submarine which lands two , soon to be suspicious of Marlon , German officers and ( conveniently ) some American prisoners and also a German Jewess.

The American prisoners are " persuaded " to join the uprising ( mutiny ? ) unfortunately it is unsuccessful

Yul sets off the remaining scuttling charges. Everyone abandons ship except himself and M  who are saved by the rubber congealing in the hole in the stern !

Yul radios the Allied ships , Marlon ...

regrets the murder of the Jewess by one of the Nazi officers.

 

N.B. per Wikipedia the above summary has some mistakes

 

 

 

 

Edited September 28, 2023 by Ewanandmoreagain

[Fullerene]

On 25/09/2023 at 22:37, velo army said:

This is the post of a man with children. Children who loved this movie and watched it repeatedly and relentlessly each Christmas, driving our favourite Academic grass demented.

If only it was that simple.

The Professor has declared it his favourite film and insists every year on the last day before Christmas every member of staff has to come to work dressed as an elf.

[Miguel Sanchez]

12 Monkeys (1995) Bruce Willis lives in 2036 where some horrible thing happened, killed five billion people and left the earth uninhabitable. Only the humans live underground, animals rule the ruined earth and humans... have the technology to send Bruce back in time to 1996 but not do anything about their current situation. Classic time travel paradox caper, only extremely surreal because Terry Gilliam directed it and the whole thing feels like a dream. The only problem is I'd seen it before I remembered halfway through how it ended.

The King of Comedy (1982) Robert De Niro really, really wants to be on TV. I found this really engrossing in a way I wasn't expecting and I think it's because there was an ironic timelessness to it. The idea of someone stalking a TV host to try and get on TV seems almost quaint now, given the things people do for attention and the ease with which the internet facilitates this. The level of notoriety can feel absolute nowadays, yet at the same time can be utterly fleeting. Anyway, good performances all round and a Scorsese picture which should be more renowned than it is because it remains so relevant. 

American Psycho (2000) Yuppie Batman starts absentmindedly doodling in his diary while listening to some fantastic music. Along the way he lives the dream of many by killing Jared Leto with an axe. I tuned out a bit towards the end because it hadn't been that long since I'd seen it and I knew how it ended, but I instead focused on just how detached Bale is from all of it. It's a masterful performance in its complete emptiness. One day I'll read the book.

Detective Pikachu (2019) About five minutes into this I went online and read the original Nuzlocke webcomic. In 40-odd pages I saw a Pokemon story which was more creative, engaging, human, entertaining and funny than this CGI ridden horrorshow. I could go into great length about things I didn't like about this but it would genuinely just be a list of bulletpoints. By far the worst thing was the design of the Pokemon themselves. This is a film from 2019 and Jurassic Park was more realistic looking than this. Absolutely hideous in every way. I hate Ryan Reynolds and he was by far the least irritating thing in the film.

Manhunter (1986) In part due to how quickly mass media moves nowadays I don't think you can broadly describe decades in the way you could in the past. If I say "the 80s" or "the 60s" relating to pretty much any aspect of western life, you'd have a general understanding of the sort of mindset and existence I was referring to. Can you do that for the 2020s? The 2010s? Is it just me unable to do this, because I'm old and don't understand the young? I'm not sure. Either way, this is the most 80s film you've ever seen and it slightly spoils things for me. The visuals and the music all seem to be well thought of now compared to when it was released, but for me there was too much going on at times. Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecktor is fantastic. 

[MSU]

199 The Bourne Identity -- Guess I'm watching Bourne movies this week. I can't believe I haven't watched it before, because now, twenty-odd years later, it's easy to forget whether this is trendsetting or jumping on the bandwagon. Because we've all seen this movie plenty of times now, where a spy who doesn't know he's a spy has to figure out his past, and we've all seen movies where the average shot length is less than 5 seconds and fights and chases, which can appear confusing actually do a great job when done correctly, like here, to throw the audience into the scene. Doug Liman really reinvents the action genre and discovers that Matt Damon is an awesome action hero along the way. There's maybe a bit too much on the exposition at the end, but this is a thrilling watch and I'm looking forward to going through the others. 7/10

200 The Bourne Supremacy -- The octane from the first movie maybe dips a little bit here but Paul Greengrass's style more than makes up for it. Jason Bourne is in India with Marie, still struggling with his memory but putting his life back together, when figures from his past drag him back into the shadows. Matt Damon is superb again and the story is gloriously twisty-turny, but it's Greengrass's direction and camera use that really makes this one stand out. It's dizzying and disorientating, but there's method to his approach here which has often been imitated but seldom with the care shown here. 8/10

201 Dumb Money -- The GameStop Share Squeeze story is based on The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, who also wrote the Facebook story in The Accidental Billionaires which was one of the worst books I've ever read and was eventually polished up by Aaron Sorkin into The Social Network. Here, I can only assume his work is unrecognizably buffed up by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo because this is actually a very interesting and complicated story told in a very captivating way. Paul Dano stars as Keith Gill, the YouTuber whose videos on why GameStop was undervalued and a great investment opportunity sparked a reddit revolution that threatened to take down billionaires and hedge funds and sparked a Congressional hearing. The movie doesn't go into the minutia of how this all worked but rather tells us the individual stories behind it. America Ferrera is a nurse looking to repay her mortgage. Anthony Ramos is a disillusioned GameStop employee. Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder are college students drowning in $100,000 of debt. Along with Seth Rogan and Nick Offerman as hedge fund CEOs, the movie focuses on how the investment rollercoaster affects each of them, and how the game is stacked against the little guy and it wears its heart on its sleeve on how it feels about that. It draws inspiration from The Big Short and looks and sounds very much like The Social Network, and it punches competitively in comparison to both. It serves as a reminder of how angry we should be at stuff like this, how that anger is ultimately futile and temporary, and it's absolutely astonishing to think that this happened just a couple of years ago when we were all working from home wondering where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. 8/10

202 The Bourne Ultimatum -- It's unusual to have a series where the first three movies build so well on the previous one, but this one seems to take it all up a notch and is my pick of the bunch so far. I loved how confused I was for spells that, given I've watched the three movies in a week, it took me a while to realize how much of this overlapped with the previous film and to figure out where the joins were. If I'd waited three years, I may well have assumed this was deja vu, which would've been a neat touch given the premise. It's just a great action movie that finds a perfect blend between running away from something, running toward something, fighting and shooting things, and the internal workings of CIA department politics. If there was any doubt beforehand, Matt Damon is an awesome action hero. 9/10

[Silvio Tattiescone]

The Journey

 

An "imagining" of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in a taxi before the Good Friday Agreement. 

 

Has it's moments but I have no idea what route they were taking from St Andrews to Edinburgh airport.

[accies1874]

39. Dumb Money - Cinema

Perhaps the most 'Good' film released this year. I'm not sure if it has found or will find an audience, but I reckon that most who do give it a shot will, at the very least, quite like it.

I won't go over the plot as that's already been done above, but I will say that it was strange seeing a trailer for an event that seemed so recent, and that's exactly why I wanted to watch it. There were a couple of films last year that had COVID as a central crux of the story (Kimi and Glass Onion are the two that stick out in my mind), but I think that this is the best encapsulation I've seen of that period - not just in relation to lockdown life, but also of the internet age. 

I expected the class warfare stuff, which is there and it's fine, however what I liked most about this was the exploration of internet forums/communities/cults, and the pandemic is the perfect setting to explore them. Despite some disregard for social distancing etc., there is a feeling of isolation for all the characters. A lot of that isolation is borne out of lockdowns, obviously, but also due to status and politics such as the debt-ridden student, the overworked single mum nurse or the subjugated GameStop employee who sticks out in my mind more than the rest due to encapsulating a lot of the themes at play. There are a bunch of different stories to be balanced, all connected by just one thing: their glorious leader, Paul Dano's character. The loneliness of both the pandemic and an increasingly online world can manifest itself in positive and negative change. This film is, imo, an example of the positive and an example of the negative was taking place at the same time, albeit not reference here (the January 6th shenanigans). They both demonstrate the power of the internet for individuals who feel oppressed, as it allows them to come together with like-minded, disillusioned people and plot to rally against their 'oppressors' led by the words of their saviour. This focuses on the positive effects of the concept of the internet democratising discussions - although it does show how traditional powers are able to influence even that - but I always have the counter-argument lingering in the back of my mind when I see this kind of story, just like it was with Belle last year. That's obviously not a mark against Dumb Money by any stretch of the imagination and it's actually a good discussion prompt to come from such a crowd-pleaser. The film is a great success when it comes to providing an insight into its characters' erratic behaviours; it's not necessarily about money, it's about escaping a certain status. 

I sometimes felt that this exploration into a larger group of characters resulted in less of a spotlight on Paul Dano as the lead which ultimately negated some of the grander emotional moments. A lot of the smaller scenes are great when it's just him and his family, or even just him on his own, and I'd argue that they're all the heart you need, but I did occasionally yearn for greater time spent on the cliched scenes of a normal, everyday guy going about his daily business before the plot kicks into gear. The opening that we did get is reminiscent of The Social Network as it lays out the protagonist's character through a conversation in a bar before jumping into the main bulk of the story, although I think The Social Network had a more gradual and understandable buildup of its plot device (Facebook in that, GameStop stocks in Dumb Money). Despite what I liked about the depiction of the internet in relation to character, the story elements linking to that did become a wee bit repetitive. It's not a story-centric film, though, and it actually does a really good job of raising the tension as the stock rises which is testament to how it makes you care about the cast of characters. 

40. R.M.N. - Cinema

Strange one. There's some absolutely excellent stuff in here but I'm not gonna be shouting from the rooftops telling folk to see it. 

It starts with one of its alternating leads, Matthias, leaving his job in a slaughterhouse after being racially abused by his co-worker, travelling back to his home village in Transylvania (no vampires, sadly; all very much grounded in reality). That opening is played out similarly to something like Blue Ruin as it's very light on dialogue and very paranoid, which sets the tone for the rest of the film as a lot of things are implied rather than explicit - this works well early on but I sometimes struggled to keep up towards the end. 

Meanwhile, the other lead, Csilla, is working at a large-scale bakery struggling to recruit, so they decide to get three Sri Lankans in to work for them. This seemed like a pretty incidental interaction, and I thought it was trying to establish the bakery rather than the story, however that incidental interaction was the catalyst for the plot which descends into sheer misery. 

Essentially, the locals don't take too kindly to the Sri Lankans "infiltrating" their village and it all goes to shit, but I felt like this inverted what Dumb Money did and the told story of a wider village through the eyes of just one person (Matthias) and the counter-argument was conveyed through Csilla. What was quite interesting about that was that neither of them were at the very heart of the story; they weren't one of the immigrants and they weren't the most vocal opponents, however their values made them gravitate towards either end of the spectrum and away from one another, fuelling more hatred. 

Despite the film not leaving any doubt that 'yes, racism is bad,' it does try and delve deeper into the motivations of the dissenters. Matthias is a man full of anger who tries to project his hypermasculinity onto his son and Csilla (his one-time shagging partner), and when there's pushback against his behaviour, he pushes back against the immigrants. And when he pushes back against the immigrants, Csilla separates herself from him which results in more anger. He encapsulates a lot of the emotional response to their arrival, and also the hypocrisy which is one of the ideas that the film is most interested in. There are multiple languages spoken throughout which are depicted by using different colours for each of the subtitles, a simple technique but one that allows you to see the different backgrounds and cultures which have arrived into the village across generations - yet they're still vehemently racist. I was more interested in how it conveyed those ideas as I wasn't massively engaged in what it was saying, although its depiction of the effects of progressiveness as a commodity was fresh to me. For a film that can be quite bombastic, such as the 15/20-minute static one-shot, it still retains a lot of ambiguity and grey areas which is why I'm a bit unsure about the whole thing. 

[BFTD]

...so the chart now goes:

1. The Exorcist
2. The Exorcist III

<massive cavernous gulf>

3. The Exorcist: The Beginning

<another smaller gulf>

4. Dominion: a prequel to The Exorcist
5. The Exorcist II
6. The Exorcist: Believer

[Miguel Sanchez]

Philadelphia (1993) Tom Hanks gets bad AIDS and gets fired and hires Denzel Washington for the wrongful dismissal lawsuit. A film about a difficult subject which doesn't perfectly straddle the line between corny and emotional is still saved in its weaker moments by its leads. Note: I watched this on TV at half six in the evening so some of the saucier language was missing. Note 2: It's actually interesting to watch this and see that Tom Hanks can act. Then the year after this he did Forrest Gump. Woof.

The Fugitive (1993) Harrison Ford is framed for the murder of his wife and Tommy Lee Jones is the US Marshal trying to capture him when he evades custody. Despite some... convenient plot contrivances which allow Han Solo to clear his name, this is a fantastic action movie with great performances throughout and a very grounded and realistic depiction of Chicago, where it was filmed and set. Note: A young, moany Julianne Moore is a nice addition.

Psycho (1960) Even though I'd seen it before this is the sort of film it's impossible to see blind. I've seen The Simpsons, so I've seen large parts of this, shot for shot. And I know what happens anyway. And reading about it, the notion of it being scandalous because it features an unmarried woman in her underwear is quite funny. And some action/killing scenes are so obviously fake and badly acted they practically break the fourth wall. Despite all of this there's an undeniable tension watching this as you wonder when and how he's going to be rumbled. 

Edited October 7, 2023 by Miguel Sanchez

[MSU]

203 The Creator -- Gareth Edwards' first movie after Rogue One is visually incredible, all the more so with a supposed budget of $80m, but has a storyline that seems to borrow a bit too much from Avatar and the aforementioned Star Wars prequel thing. Some decades in the future and man's pursuit of advancing AI has ended in the only way it can possibly end: the annihilation of Los Angeles in a nuclear explosion. Following this, the US understandably takes against AI and seeks to rid the world of it, but a country called New Asia remains as last bastion of the technology where human, robot warriors, and sort of halfway-house simulants live in harmony or something. A mission is launched to track down and kill Nirmata, an AI messiah who is rumored to have built a weapon capable of taking down The Death Star, or NOMAD as it's called here; an enormous airborne laser station that's capable of destroying anything in its path. Maybe it is called The Death Star. I forget. John David Washington plays Joshua, a former special forces agent who lost his pregnant wife, discovers that the weapon is a 9-year-old girl. Madeleine Yuna Voyles is amazing as the kid, but the storyline is overblown in terms of the runtime, the depth of the world it creates, and the political and ethnic issues it drags up. I feel like it's trying to say something about the treatment of refugees in the real world, trying to remind us that we're all the same underneath it all, we're all trying to give our kids a future, but it goes about that side of its business in a heavy-handed, exposition-laden, and dismissive way, so the emotional beats designed to coax a tear from my robotic eye feel cheap. 5/10 

204 The Bourne Legacy -- I don't really care for Jeremy Renner -- to me, he's always just the boring Avenger that's, I dunno, a good aim or something. So I had issues substituting him in for Matt Damon while keeping the Bourne name in the title. Surprisingly, the first section of this with Oscar Isaac and Renner in the Alaskan wilderness is actually pretty decent stuff, but it becomes a bit dull after that when I suspect it's supposed to get exciting. All the stuff about chems and reds and greens just sounded stupid and I never really felt engaged with the story. I still like the way it messes with its own timeline but this is a low point in the series by a clear margin. 5/10

205 The Exorcist: I'm a Belieber -- This is a brilliant example of a movie, cynically and lazily made, that doesn’t earn anything it’s trying to do. I imagine David Gordon Green and Danny McBride sat down and watched The Exorcist, or read its plot summary on Wikipedia, and hot on the heels of making disappointing Halloween movies, decided to go one better by making an awful Exorcist sequel. The first one opened in Iraq? Let’s open this one in Haiti! The first one has one little girl? Let’s have two! Reprise the utterance of *that* line and throw in a head-spin? Why the hell not! And while we're at it, let's ignore the ambiguity around why Regan got possessed in the first place and this time we'll make it crystal clear. I'm not a huge fan of The Exorcist -- it's fine -- but even I can see some of the elements that Green and McBride have ripped off here without the first clue of why they were important or how they served the story, and it leaves me sad that they somehow convinced Ellen Burstyn to be involved. I didn't expect this to be a definitive take on the Exorcist mythos, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad and dull and empty, and only Pazuzu himself can have the faintest idea of what horror awaits in the proposed sequels. If the makers have any conscience, those sequels will never see the light of day, and the master copy of this will be thrown down a very steep flight of stairs. Without all the baggage of being an Exorcist sequel, this is probably a 3/10 movie but because of what it's trying to emulate, it's a 1/10 every day of the week.

206 On Fire -- A "true" story of a family who are forced to evacuate their home when they're caught up in a Californian brush fire is timely enough and fair play to the folks who made this, they've succeeded in making a movie and getting it a release and that's pretty impressive, and they've done that without looking like they've spent a fortune in doing so. But by any other measure, this is a dreadful experience, poorly acted, woefully scripted, stupid and funny in an unintentional way, and actually has a character screaming, "f**k you, fire!" at the fire. It has a feel of an 80s made-for-TV movie that's based on an outline of an idea that no one could be bothered fleshing out into anything more substantial. The mother in the family is 8-months pregnant, the father-in-law misses his deceased wife, and the son runs cross-country and you can honestly fill in most of the movie's plot points from that information alone. It does, however, feature the dad vampire from Twilight who I have now seen in four movies that have a combined score of 6/40, which is impressively low. 2/10

[welshbairn]

The Creator. Was hoping for some thoughtful sci-fi but yet another remake of the Vietnam War with the plucky napalm bombed peasants literally played by robots. Bladerunner it ain't. 

Edited October 8, 2023 by welshbairn

[JustOneCornetto]

(71) Europa Report (2013) – Netflix

Very much my type of sci-fi, this is about a mission to explore Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon. The story of the mission is done in documentary style showing found footage from various cameras on the ship and we also see some live action aboard the ship so once you get used to the way it skips about the film has a lot of tension and some great shots giving a real sense of being in space, The crew are all likeable enough and I’d recommend if you liked films like Moon, Gravity and The Martian. 7.5/10

(72) Oxygen (2021) – Netflix

Not recommended if you are claustrophobic. A woman wakes up from a cryogenic sleep in some sort of pod with no recollection of how or why she is there. It’s all filmed in this small space and with oxygen running out it’s a race against time to try and find out how she got there and how to escape with her only help being the onboard computer assistant. Difficult to say any more without revealing spoilers but it all becomes a much bigger premise than first imagined. 7/10

(73) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) – Sky Cinema

Was sure I had seen this but turns out this was my first watch and what a nice surprise. It’s basically a rom-com wrapped up in a sci-fi concept where all memories about a partner are able to be wiped out. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are good together then add in a great supporting cast to make this a really daft but endearing film at the same time. 8/10

(74) Dr Strangelove (1964) – DVD

Brilliant satire on the Cold War and the nuclear threat. So many gags with Peter Sellers at his very best as he plays the stiff upper lip British Officer, the US President and the eccentric Dr Strangelove, with George C Scott also proving he can do great comedy as well. ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room’ is one of the greatest lines ever. 8.5/10

[DA Baracus]

17 hours ago, JustOneCornetto said:

Was sure I had seen this but turns out this was my first watch

Very good.

[scottsdad]

Airplane!

Simply the funniest movie ever made.