Topic: The Movie Thread

@BearsEatBeets @FuriousMachine Does look cool. Do we know if it's abandoning the "Prometheus" and "Covenant" storyline? I think I read somewhere it's set between the first two movies - an interquel if you like. @nessisonett Shhhhh. You'll upset @XandertheWise with all your crazy forbidden talk of resolutions and film grain.

@LN78 Hahaha, I don’t have one of those massive TVs anyway so 4K isn’t as much of a bump as on larger TVs but it’s definitely noticeable. Having said that on the other end of the scale, I really need to hunt down a decent SDTV for my DVDs because I hadn’t quite realised how bad they look on a modern TV!

@LN78 I can't quite recall when it's set, not sure I've seen info on that. I did look it up a while back as I got recommended one of those fake trailers and tried looking for a real one only to find a load more fake ones, so I looked to see if they actually were making a new Alien film.
I did discover at the time that they are also making a tv series. That apparently is going to be set on Earth three decades before the original film which made me wonder how that is going to work. Surely the xenomorphs only exist on far off planets at that time so curious what it's actually going to be about.
Anyway I get the feeling this has nothing to do with Promotheus/Covenant story. Hopefully what you saw is correct as that sounds more interesting.

EDIT: You are right, just discovered a video interviewing the Director and it confirms it is between the first 2 films.

watching House on Haunted Hill remake on Tubi right now. the evil "Darkness" entity is sort of similar to what goes on in The Haunting remake

@LN78 @BearsEatBeets I'm not sure if Romulus will ignore Prometheus and Covenant or not, but I do know that the series will. It's being shepherded by Noah Hawley and he's stated that he will pretend the sequels doesn't exist (he will more or less take his cues from Alien and Aliens only). A great article with lots of promising details on the show can be found over at The Playlist (link)

@FuriousMachine I try to ignore or forget everything after "Alien 3" so I like the cut of his jib.

@LN78 Agreed! I remember liking Alien Resurrection when I saw it at Oslo Filmfestival back in the day, but upon reviewing it a little under a decade ago I realized that it was probably a false memory, because... whoof...
Thinking about it, after Alien 3, I think I would point to the first AvP as the best of the sequels and that is very telling of how I feel about the others

@FuriousMachine I had totally forgotten about the AvP movies.... the second one is especially bad. Christ these movies have been on a bad run. Hopefully Alien can have a redemption story like Predator with this latest film.

@JohnnyShoulder Yeah, the second one was atrocious. I didn't mind the first one all that much, to be honest. Didn't love it, but didn't hate it either. If the new Alien movie lands in the vicinity of Prey, quality wise, I would be very happy indeed.

@FuriousMachine i've never been some huge Alien fan as I've only seen the first movie, but getting Noah Hawley on the show is probably a best case scenario to revitalize the franchise quality-wise at least. That man knows how to adapt a property and turn it into its own thing, so far to often incredible results like with Fargo and Legion. The one thing I'd have reservations with with him is how he tends to be on the less commercial side in terms of the appeal of his storytelling. That said, I'd be surprised if Disney would let him get too crazy with the property.

Romulus looked quite promising as well though. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that one. It's always interesting to see streaming movies get promoted to cinema releases.

@Tjuz 100% agree re: Hawley. I would love to have seen what he would have done with the Doctor Doom movie he was working on prior to the Fox/Disney buyout, but alas... I've also read one of his novels, Before the Fall (Goodreads page) which I liked quite a lot as well, so I'm definitely excited to see what he'll do in the Alien universe.

@FuriousMachine Thanks for the link, he says a lot of good things. Interesting point about maintaining the 'dated' look of the future. Still curious how it will work being set decades before the first film but I am starting to think that info I saw on IMDB might be wrong.
Despite getting some entertainment from watching Prometheus and Covenant, I also consider Alien a 2 film franchise. Same for the Terminator.

saw Ghostbusters 4 Frozen Empire earlier today. I enjoyed it. Nice to see the return of Slimer even though he napped under a pile of junk food the whole time. and Peck being Mayor

cute and funny for a post credit scene of the little mini puft marshmallow men stealing a truck with the logo of Stay Puft Marshmallows.

On the Waterfront really is very good. To be honest most ‘good’ movies from ages ago usually live up to their reputations, the art of the review was far more serious back then and was as much of a craft as the movies themselves. I guess I wasn’t quite expecting it to resonate with me in the way that it did. Never been like a huge Marlon Brando fan (apart from Guys and Dolls in vein of Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia) but I sort of get why he was such a big deal now.

Against my better instincts (and ignoring the reviews) went to see "Ghostbusters 4". What a tired, cynical, unfocused, unfunny, corporate decreed piece of crap - worse than the (awful) last installment by a country mile. The only people who cared less than Bill Murray were the writers and maybe Aykroyd who has the dubious distinction of having appeared in and approved of multiple movies on the "worst sequels of all time" list - one of which is "Blues Brothers 2000" and two (or three) from this God forsaken franchise. He should be ashamed of himself.
PS Just listened to Mark Kermode's review. Not for the first time I 100% agree with him.
PPS Just remembered that Aykroyd also had a cameo in "Caddyshack 2". He must be going for the record.

@LN78 I'll be giving that a wide berth, seeing as the last Ghostbusters film I thought was a waste of time. I'll stick with the first two films which I have on blu ray.

@JohnnyShoulder True story - I took "Afterlife" out of my Special Edition boxset and replaced it with a PS3 copy of the videogame. I was close to walking out of "Frozen Empire" by about the halfway mark. If it wasn't throwing it down with rain outdoors I probably would have. It's absolutely desperate.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Cinema) - Maybe it's just because I wasn't expecting much from it, but I actually enjoyed this a bit. It does seem a tad bit moodier than previous outings, but it's still very much comedy first, horror second. Now, a lot of the comedy comes in the form of standard "sitcom family" jokes amongst the core cast/family & nostalgic call backs to the classic films (& it appears they've decided that the mini Stay Puft marshmallow men from the last one are a permanent fixture, taking on the role similar to Despicable Me's minions, goofing around the lab(s)), so the quality in that department is up for debate, but my theatre seemed to be into it. Without getting into spoilers, the thing that seemed most out of place to me was the subplot involving a friendly ghost who just acted like a regular person.

the Departed (Blu-Ray) - a young cop with a troubled past becomes a police informant embedding himself amongst the Boston Mob (with the boss being Jack Nicholson), but things aren't as easy as first seemed because an all star cop amongst the force is himself a mole in service of the Mob, and both are soon in a race to find out who the other rat is. Picked this up thrifting, and it ended up being a pretty fantastic movie. Really gripping.

Otaku no Video (Blu-Ray) - Really interesting insight into Otaku culture of the 80's & 90's. It follows a young college student who falls in with a crowd of otaku & you can see how becoming a shut in affects his personal life & relationships (of course, being an anime film targeted directly at the otaku audience, things end up much happier for him, as he gets the last laugh against society). Still, it seems like there is some truth to it's depiction of otaku culture of the era, given that it's very loosely based on how Studio Gainax (it's animation studio) was founded. Also had fake live action "interviews" with former/closeted Otaku which made me a bit self conscious about my anime figure collection, lol.

Summer School Teachers (Tubi) - 70's B-comedy that follows a trio of aspiring Midwestern teachers who head out to California for a shot at education careers out on the coast, but these free spirited young women are going to have to win over their conservative/old timey colleagues in order to make it. Pretty poorly made & had a few tonal inconsistencies (the science teacher's storyline felt more serious & drama-ish compared to the comedic tones of the other two stories), but it had a charm to it & had a few laughs.

@LN78 I’d probably get shanked by a group of nerds like The Ides of March but I’d easily say Ghostbusters 2016 is better than Afterlife and that new one (dragged to see it by deadbeat dad stuck in the 80s). It’s obviously terrible in many ways but at this point I’ll take a million female-led reboots of existing franchises over bringing back ancient actors to half-arse their roles for a paycheck. Ghostbusters is ultimately a film that just doesn’t work outside of the 80s. I’m gonna guess that Beetlejuice 2 meets the same fate.

@nessisonett I think you are spot on re: should have stayed in the 80s. That being said, I actually enjoyed Afterlife more than I did the 2016 reboot, and I think that was down to expectations. Let me say that I find Melissa McCarthy somewhat... hmm.. I don't know, but I'm not much of a fan (fell in love with her in Bridesmaids, but then I felt that she just capitalized on that for a long while and it got tiresome and by the time Ghostbusters came along I was a little bit worn out by it). That said, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Kristen Wiig? The Holy Triumvirate of Awesome Funny Women from SNL (TM, I'm sure)? How could it go wrong? Well, felt it was good, but kind of lackluster. Upon second viewing, I was kind of bored.
Afterlife? Had a good time with it when I expected to hate it. Second viewing? Still entertained (though not worth getting on physical, so not over the moon). Skeptical about Frozen Empire; some people love it, some hate it, but I read somewhere (and I think it might have been on this very thread) that it is paradoxical that one makes a movie that should be squarely aimed at younger audiences yet works so hard at satisfying the 40 and 50 year old dads (like me) that it almost alienates younger audiences the movie should appeal to. Not having seen the movie I can't speak to it myself, but I suspect that this is the case. I call it "Stranger Things" syndrome. Whereas the first season worked on many levels, as we got into season 2 it was basically "nostalgia p0rn" where you couldn't go two minutes without a forced reference to an 80s movie, toy or band.

I fear you may be right about Beetlejuice 2. Would love for it to be a good movie, but I'm not hopeful.