What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Scorge]

Immaculate - Sydney Sweeney as a nun, which will probably lure in some of the posters on 'that' thread over in general nonsense right now. It's a fairly generic dark-quiet-dark-quiet-THUMP horror for about an hour, but her performance is really good, and the final 20 minutes are deliciously nasty.

Late Night With The Devil - now THIS is my kind of unsettling slow burner horror film. David Dalmaschithingimabob playing as a slick 70's American TV show on 31st October (tick) as a piece of found footage (tick) with a young female guest who does exorcismy things (tick). Sounds counter intuitive, but if you ignore it as a horror film and watch it with a straight bat a'la Alan Partridge Does Halloween, then it's great fun, and the visuals/set/etc are really good. Suitably bonkers final act, too. Won't be everyone's cuppa, but I loved it.

[mathematics]

46 minutes ago, Scorge said:

Sydney Sweeney as a nun,

What kind of nun? The good kind?

[Squalor Vic]

RoadHouse (2024)

Conor Magregor must have funded some of this as it's the only explanation for why he is in it. Quite possibly the worst acting I've ever seen in a 'big' release like this. Plus he looks coked out his nut and I think he wrote his own lines too. It's also 2 hours long.

Apart from all that, I thought it was awright 6/10

[accies1874]

After Hours (1985) - Cinema

The first older release I've reviewed this year. Headed along to the showing at the GFT yesterday having never seen it before, and as I was watching I knew I had to talk about it. 

Firstly, it ticked a few of my boxes. I love films that take place across one day or night, I love films that weave through a location with a fun cast of characters, and I love it when a film starts and end at the same place to make you consider the main character's development. For anyone who hasn't seen After Hours, it's about a man, Paul, who walks out of his boring job and gets smitten by a woman in a café. He goes to her flat and a night of escapades ensues. And boy are those escapades entertaining. 

It's the kind of film that gets laughs out of the way the plot moves, setting up disasters and coming back to almost all of them which leads to further disaster, almost like three acts of a joke: something funny happens, then you start smiling when you realise it's coming back around, then it gets a laugh out of you when it's revealed. The concept is so simple (man tries to get home with 97 cents to his name) but the film's so perfectly plotted that I couldn't stop smiling throughout. It all links together which, along with a load of characters with distinct characteristics, makes the streets of New York feel even more alive. 

You've also got a main character, played by Griffin Dunne, who's somewhat typical in terms of being a normal dude, dryly funny, who gets tangled up in a web of nonsense, but there's interesting stuff going on in terms of class, fulfilment and isolation. I thought that the sculptures that play a prominent role, made up of paper materials like news clippings and $20 bills, were a quite provocative metaphor for this. The fusion between the dreamlike entertainment and the nightmarish disasters is what set it apart for me as something really special. 

Just a shame that I can never wear my shirt and trousers combo similar to Paul's in this ever again in case folk have seen the film, though I'm a blazer/suit jacket away from a good costume for an 80s-themed party. 

Edited March 23 by accies1874

[TheScarf]

Office Space (1999)

There isnt much to be said about this other than it's absolutely brilliant. I've seen it at least 10 times now. If you've never seen it, get it watched. 

[MSU]

060 Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire -- Please stop now. 2/10

[scottsdad]

Tickets booked for The Naked Gun on 1st April.

[Scotty Tunbridge]

Watched Poor Things ‘wtaf’ was my reaction to a lot of it.  It looked beautiful at points with vibrant colours and the plot all came together quite nicely at the end, Bella’s adventure/journey(?) told an interesting tale but none of that can really take away from the aforementioned what the f*ck expression I had on my face for the majority of it.

[Bully Wee Villa]

I thought it was excellent. 

[KnightswoodBear]

Dune Part Two.

I thought this was excellent and visually stunning.  If I'm being ever so slightly picky, it's not quite at the level of Part One.  They've made a couple of big changes from the book and left out a really pretty major plot thread that will need to be introduced if Part Three is made.

I felt that it rushed the ending slightly as well.

[MONKMAN]

Poor Things - spent the majority of the film wondering what the f**k I was actually watching.
Visually, it’s superb.  It’s as engrossing as it is messed up, which is a lot. I lost count of the amount of times the wife and myself just looked at each other in agreement thinking “what the f**k is actually going on here”. Utterly bizarre film that is unlike anything I’ve seen before. 
Emma Stone deserved her Oscar though, she was superb. 

[BFTD]

Madame Web (totally legal download) - there's a pregnant spider lady who dies in the Amazon, and the fabled spider-men of the rainforest spirit her baby away, then thirty years later her killer has these fever dreams about teenagers coming to kill him, and the spider-lady's daughter has visions of the bad guy killing them first, so she has to rescue them, and...jeezo.

Just, everything is wrong with this, right from the script stage. Morbius was bad, but this is such a miserable, mediocre mess that it seems like that's what they were aiming for. Barely anybody reacts to anything like a human being, the CG is occasionally hilarious, and the painful attempt to make this the start of a series is delusional. Presumably the idea is that Sony want to humiliate Disney into paying them to stop making these things.

[Bully Wee Villa]

Surely there must be other comic book characters they could buy the rights to rather than keep making films about bit part players to a more famous person who isn't featuring in the film?

Does anyone have the film rights to Desperate Dan, Bananaman or Sid the Sexist?

[velo army]

11 hours ago, KnightswoodBear said:

Dune Part Two.

I thought this was excellent and visually stunning.  If I'm being ever so slightly picky, it's not quite at the level of Part One.  They've made a couple of big changes from the book and left out a really pretty major plot thread that will need to be introduced if Part Three is made.

I felt that it rushed the ending slightly as well.

I loved this. The cinematography is incredible and the soundtrack is perfect. The performances are beyond anything I've ever seen. Everyone is great in it. Lea Seydoux is in it for about 5 minutes and is magnificent. Austin Butler and Javier Bardem could both take the supporting actor gong for this. Butler is a potential all time great. His performance is one of the best I've ever seen.

Chalamet has real presence on screen and I didn't expect that. 

It was long (the lassie I watched it with, of Indian ancestry, said it was longer than a Bollywood movie ) but I'll go and see it again.

[accies1874]

25. Monster - Cinema

Monster is three linking stories that all begin with the same fire and end with the same storm. The first is about a mum who thinks her son is being bullied by a teacher, the second is about the teacher and the third is about the son. Rashomon is an obvious comparison as you see events from different perspectives and peel back what might be a case of unreliable narration, but it becomes more and more like a Kore-eda film as time goes on, culminating in something very touching. 

I think it's hard to talk about a new Hirokazu Kore-eda film without considering his wider filmography as, from the ones I've seen, they're so often moral deconstructions of family. In Monster, this didn't appear to be the case for a fair chunk of it, but you get more of a sense of how this fits in alongside the likes of Shoplifters, I Wish or Broker with every shift in perspective. He's also very good at letting you see the world through the eyes of children with all of their naiveties and delusions which can almost take the form of fairytale-esque moments. Here, that's bright green foliage in the third story to punctuate the greys and beiges that tend to make up the colour palette. 

The fact that so much of the film's heart is found in the final section means that it would be natural to complain about the first two, but they set up a compelling mystery about truths, facades and relationships within the confines of a school (if you've seen The Teachers' Lounge, it'll remind you of that) which also makes it perhaps the most 'entertaining' Kore-eda film I've seen. That mystery has a real purpose too. It poses the question about how much you know about a person from limited interactions, flipping what you see on its head quite a few times, which works perfectly with the story it's telling. You could reverse the order of the three stories and it would become a different film, but its structure conceals information about characters' relationships which makes the emotional beats all the more impactful when you begin to learn what was going on. 

I'm being quite vague as I think you should experience the story playing out naturally. I also had a complaint about it having a few generic things but specific comparisons would probably spoil the mystery, and tbh Monster's structure sets it apart from those other films anyway. 

[BFTD]

6 hours ago, Bully Wee Villa said:

Surely there must be other comic book characters they could buy the rights to rather than keep making films about bit part players to a more famous person who isn't featuring in the film?

Does anyone have the film rights to Desperate Dan, Bananaman or Sid the Sexist?

Not a fan myself, but I'm genuinely a bit surprised that Dan Dare hasn't had a relaunch. I guess maybe there isn't an international fan base.

If you recall, they tried making a Fat Slags film, which was an inexplicable flop. Maybe Roger Mellie would be a better bet?

[19QOS19]

Trying to get through 'the classics'/Best Picture winners. Watched a few already and thought they were worth the hype then there's this:-

 

The Deer Hunter 

Didn't get this. At all. Don't know if it's of its time or it's my lack of interest in the Vietnam war but I struggled to get through this. I know the point was to see how the characters were effected by the war but for me the character development wasn't there for me enough to care. A 3 hour film and they just didn't develop then well enough. About half an hour spent watching a boring fecking wedding yet the Vietnam stuff felt rushed and minimal. 

I'll need to watch the other nominees of that year to see how shite they were for this to win. Though I watched Midnight Express when I was a lot younger and thought it was ok. Certainly better than this. 

Unforgiven up yet. 

[Boo Khaki]

Titane

French thing where a wee lassie gets a steel plate put in her heid after a car accident. She grows up with a sexual attraction to motors, and gets pumped by the spirit/ghost thing of a custom car. She then murders a load of folk for no apparent reason, goes on the run, pretends to be a laddie, hooks up with a load of extremely homoerotic firefighters, and eventually gives birth to some sort of baby/transformer/cyborg thing.

Can't decide if it's a work of genius, insanity, or a bit of both. 

[accies1874]

Definitely both. I still remember the dread I felt in the cinema when things started getting very nasty in the first half, then the admiration when I realised it was veering off in a completely different direction (and why it was doing so). 

[mathematics]

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad