Movies you've seen recently

[renfield]

Watched a couple A24 dealios.

SAINT MAUD - a young woman believes God is talking to her and does increasingly psychotic shit to prove her devotion. I guess I wished this was more like Bill Paxton's masterpiece FRAILTY where you're not really sure if it's all in her head or she's really a soldier in the battle between god and satan, but the film is more interested in being a quiet character study.

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE - dude's follow up to IT FOLLOWS which I really liked. This is a potentially great film if you cut it down by about an hour and come up with a better 'final revelation'. It's about some fuckup hipster getting lost in the underbelly of Hollywood, kind of in the vibe of THE BIG LEBOWSKI or THE LONG GOODBYE where it's clearly a Sam Seder esque noir protagonist embodied in a stoner/slacker. The scariest scene in the movie is the most original, where he wanders upon an old man playing a piano who demonically gloats about how he's written every single piece of music familiar to us, from modern pop songs to Beethoven's fifth. I appreciated this movie's ambition but it didn't quite come together for me.

[Dylan Thomas]

Yeah Inglourious Basterds... not really a remake, is it? The only real thing it has in common with the original film is the title and somethign to do with Nazis.

It's such a well made film. The strudel scene is a master class in coiled-fuse tension. Christoph Waltz's performance. Can't really relate to your reaction at all I'm afraid

I don't think that I even made it through enough of it to see how much fidelity it had to the original, though I definitely didn't find it as colorful, funny and goofy as the original.  I don't think I made it through more than say, 20 minutes, 30 tops?  So I didn't see this strudel scene.

I remember just thinking that the dialogue was really poorly written and forced, which is often my problems with some of Tarantino's more over-the-top movies.  I know that some people really like his dialogues in particular, though I often find them to be cringe inducing.  Also,  expectations are often a big part of my reactions to art, and I'd imagine I was expecting a really fun movie, like the original.  I didn't find it to be fun at all, so I turned it off.

You're right that it didn't share much with the original other than the name and that it's set in World War II.  The plot of the original was that they were stealing a Nazi warhead, so that's not even the same.

[renfield]

Tarantino's dialog is very artificial and stylized, I get how it's a turn off to some people. Ditto Lynch and Cronenberg. People in those movies don't talk like real people by any stretch, but that's not really the objective in my opinion

[Dylan Thomas]

I agree that it's not the objective, and I'll have to try to watch the movie again with fresh eyes.

Speaking of expectations, I watched the two newer IT movies, and was pleasantly surprised.  I didn't think that they were the great by any means, and I thought that the first one was better than the second (and truer to the source material).  However, again, my expectations were very low given how many people seemed to hate on them and say they sucked when they saw them in the theater, which was why I was in no rush to watch them.  I found them to be entertaining, grotesque, imaginative, and even shocking at times.

I especially liked how the second movie started by openly mocked the ending of the book, and suggested that endings could be changed in movie adaptations if people didn't care for the ending of the book in question, then went on to change the ending.  That was pretty clever.  What didn't work for me so much about the second was that a lot of it felt like filler that was added to justify breaking the movie into two parts.  It seemed like much of the gratuitous material was added just to make the second movie as long as the first movie, which did follow much closer to the book.

My 2 cents, curious what others thought of the films.....

[renfield]

I think the fatal flaw of both IT adaptation was dividing the kid section and adult section. In the book, they're mingled together: the adults get together and then you see the stuff that happened when they were kids through flashbacks. This works better because the adults are comparatively boring on their own and 90% of the plot happens to the kids. I think that's the biggest reason why It Chapter 2 and the second half of the Tim Curry miniseries both kinda suck.

I liked the newer movies, but I didn't find them even slightly scary. The book isn't really that scary either though I suppose, more just gruesome.

[Dylan Thomas]

Totally agree with that, my girlfriend had not read the book and straight up asked me at the start of the second one if the books were structured and paced in the same manner, and I told her the book started with the beginning of the first movie, then jumps to the beginning of the second movie, etc.

From a studio standpoint, I get why they'd do that, so we have a more "coherent" two part series that has some closure at the end of the first part, though it definitely made the second parts more lackluster.  Much of the padding in part 2 was really superfluous.  Only about the first half hour and last 45 minutes were really necessary, and still none of that material was as good as the backstory with the kids.

[Lumpy]

The Quiet One - Bill Wyman documentary. I thought it was really quite good. You get a real insight into his life and his personality, and there's lots of good footage of the early and mid period Stones (he quit around 1990). It's on Hulu.

[whoshotthefrog]

Wish I saw this years ago. Great movie. Fight scenes were intense and quite realistic.

[peoplething]

Psycho Gorman - awesome
Bloody good time at house harker - great
A werewolf in england - werewolf literally shits all over two dudes, what more can you say

'Val'- really well done and absolutely worth a watch

[Dylan Thomas]

I saw The Green Knight.


Really, really liked it.  Weird, existential, makes you think.

[mortlock]

been on a bit of a tom hardy kick lately. watched legend, lawless and capone. all awesome. he was so good in capone. pretty much just mumbled throughout the whole movie while smoking a carrot. lawless was my fav of the 3.

of course bronson is an underground classic.

 

[peoplething]

Hardy in Capone didn't really act much imo. He grumbled, went psychotic and shit himself. It must of been hilariously fun to play, but I think alot of actors could've performed as well.

Bronson is amazing. I'm still kinda surprised it's not more well known.

my ex has been in love with Hardy forever, I know way more than I want to about the man. 

[renfield]

Rewatched The Hobbit. Thought it was garbage at the time, but now it's frankly insane how much more gravity and care went into it than the assembly line MCU movies. If it had come out in the 80s and had fun practical effects instead of awful looking CGI I think it would be considered a classic on par with DRAGONSLAYER.

[peoplething]

Tolken IP has been notoriously political for decades. I almost get the feeling family members or  producers or somebody actually had to die before some parts of production could go forward lol. Superhero stuff has been commodified for as long if not longer.

I still haven't seen The Hobbit, but the og triology like a bazillion times in the 00's.

[socket]

I saw the first half of The Hobbit. The whole first flick.. Don't really remember it being good or bad but it stopped at a really stupid spot and credits rolled.

[whoshotthefrog]

This was ok. Felt like a rip-off of The Human Centipede.

[mortlock]

Anyone see the medium yet? Looks fairly terrifying.

[peoplething]

I hadn't heard about this movie until the 4k restoration and release, but it gets all sorts of praise.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/possession-movie-review-2021

had to stop 10 minutes in but wow, it looks rad. and Neil looks like he's tweleve lol

edit: absolutely deserves it's cult status. First time through it was pretty sloggy for me, the overacting can be brutal if you're not prepared, and the color contrasts from scene to scene made me eyes hurt. I thought it was kinda obvious the story is about narcissistic drug addicts from the start with a bunch of wierdo soul possession stuff throw on top. Definitely worth a watch but the filler can get tedious.

[renfield]

Hellraiser 1 and 2. When I was a kid they were the really gnarly hardcore one of all the mainstream horror franchises, but now the cenobites just seem like old friends. If you think about it it's probably preferable to run across them as compared to a Jason or a Mike Myers since they'll hear you out and let you talk them out of the extreme BDSM stuff they want to do to you.

[RAGER]

Mystery Road. Australian.

Modern day Western crime thing. Very Australian. Slow burn. Good cinematography. I liked it.

Free on YouTube premium.

[neighbor664]

[Dylan Thomas]

So I saw quote/unquote "Dune".  I hesitate to call it Dune, even.

Ooof.  What a doozy.  This could really be the doozy of all doozies for me, at least if we're talking about a failure to translate source material to the screen.

[neighbor664]

So I saw quote/unquote "Dune".  I hesitate to call it Dune, even.

Ooof.  What a doozy.  This could really be the doozy of all doozies for me, at least if we're talking about a failure to translate source material to the screen.

It took me many years to appreciate the Lynch movie. I can't say I was ever a big fan. I've never got around to reading the books. I knew of the movie first and I guess it couldn't inspired me to dig further. My expectations may be lower than yours, so I may not be disappointed as either way.
I'd sprung for a month of HBO Max to binge on a few old horror films and see what the new Dune hype was about. I have yet to commit to watching it all the way through though. I'd started to the other day, and got maybe a half hour in then realized that I'm in for a different movie than I'd sat down for. I went back to the 8o's horror film binge I'd been on prior to that idea.

[Pissy]

Watched Halloween Kills last night.   Everyone gets an overacting award. 

[renfield]

So I saw quote/unquote "Dune".  I hesitate to call it Dune, even.

Ooof.  What a doozy.  This could really be the doozy of all doozies for me, at least if we're talking about a failure to translate source material to the screen.

I completely disagree. Huge fan of the novel and this is the first adaptation that communicated the feeling of reading that book, ironically by the very decision of choosing to leave things opaque / mysterious / unexplained. The alternative would have been endless exposition dumps and having characters who know what mentats are explain to each other what mentats are for the audience's benefit.

The way I look at it is: reading the novel or watching the movie, there's so much that is beyond the reader's/viewer's understanding. Who the fuck is Princess Irulan and why is she writing about Paul as if he's somebody from the past? You constantly are presented with the sense that there's a depth to the world beyond what you're seeing on the page / on the screen.