"Preoccupied with a single leaf, you won’t see the tree. Preoccupied with a single tree, you’ll miss the entire forest. Don't be preoccupied with a single spot. See everything in its entirety...effortlessly. That is what it means...to truly "see." "
@LN78 I’m actually a fan of JLaw, I think the fact she’s an Oscar winning actress is a bit overshadowed by all the clangers she’s done. Mother! is one of those movies you’ll either be fascinated by or think is pretentious drivel and I can see both sides of the argument. It’s overblown and quite a bit bonkers but better than The Fountain, which for me felt like an absolute mess!
@LN78 Yeah mother! is a bit bonkers and is one of those films which is hard to reccomended. I totally didn't know what to make of it and I think that was the intention of the filmmakers to leave it open to the viewer to decide. It could be seen as a christ allegory but could also be seen as a couple of other things too. I knew nothing about the film before i saw it, which is usually a benefit when watching a film, but I kind of wish I knew a bit more about it. It can also be quite uncomfortable to watch in places and IIRC my dad walked out at on part to have a breather.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
Subbed to horror movie streaming service Shudder recently, so I've watched a few films I've wanted to see for a while, and... well, results aren't great so far (for the movies; the service itself is fine).
I'll be discussing some spoilers with these films, so... reader beware?
I started with recent cult horror film Mandy. I'd heard a lot about this one from people whose opinions I trust, and there are some things to like here. The latter half of the film is a great vehicle for Nicholas Cage's very particular brand of overacted cinematic insanity, and it was fun watching him lose his mind and become a sort of medieval vigilante who forges a battle axe and sets off to avenge his cruelly slain titular girlfriend. But, to get to the fun bits, one has to sit through an hour or so of pretentious, "stylized" cinematography that I guess is supposed to be establishing atmosphere, but, honestly, I found it all rather dull. Characters mumble and slur their lines in a narcoleptic haze (this was one of the few movies where I actually kept the closed-captioning turned on the entire time) and, half the time, scenes are bathed in gaudy red or purple lighting. Plot and character-wise, there's really nothing to this film. Some cult leader (dubbed a "jesus freak" and "hippy," but his cult possesses magical artifacts that can summon motorcycle riding demons, so...) happens to see Mandy, Cage's girlfriend, as he's driving by her in a van one day, and his cult, along with the clearly Cenobite-inspired biker demons as helpers, abducts her and her boyfriend to try and induct them into his cult (Mandy as a concubine, I guess). Things go south, and Nicholas Cage spends the rest of the film going on a nutty killing spree. There's a lot of potential for this to be good, and, in some respects, I did enjoy it, but it's a very uneven experience. Definitely inferior to Cage's other recent horror outing, The Color Out of Space.
The second film I watched was In the Mouth of Madness, an obviously Lovecraft-inspired flick by accomplished horror director John Carpenter about an insurance fraud investigator (played by Sam Neill, or, as most people are likely to know him, the grumpy protagonist in Jurassic Park who likes to scare children with visions of disembowelment) who goes looking for a popular horror writer who has gone missing. This writer's work is apparently causing people to become insane and violent, and the publisher wants to know where he has gone. This film has some redeeming qualities, insofar as it plays a lot with the idea of reality and fantasy becoming blurred, and the inherently subjective nature of human consciousness, but the plot becomes an incoherent, poorly written mess as it goes on. Carpenter was attempting to capture a gradual divorce from reality with its main character, but I found that the movie itself just became sort of disjointed and confusing. Perhaps this was the intent, and the structure of the film is meant to mirror its protagonist's own slipping grip on what is real, but I grew bored with this approach. The film's ending has an apocalyptic angle that I liked, but, overall, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
The last, and worst, film was acclaimed Italian splatter cinema maestro Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. While it's not his most famous film (that would be Zombi 2), many fans of this man's work (and he has a considerable cult following among horror aficionados) consider this to be his masterpiece. What better way to be introduced to his films, I thought! Or not. This is described by fans as a textured, surrealistic, and dreamlike cinematic experience, but really all it is is a borderline incoherent, poorly dubbed film that only exists to feed the director's apparent fetish for gore and eye trauma. SO much eye trauma. Want to nails gouge out eyes, of both the metal and finger variety? Want to watch tarantulas eat out a guy's eyes? Hell, want to watch a woman's face melt in acid? These setpieces, and more, are what the film exists for. They're not terribly convincing practical effects (most of the gore looked very fake to me), but this wasn't supposed to be realistic. It was supposed to be gross, and boy, is it gross. Peoples' skin peels like soft cheese, and practically any injury leads to an almost obscene amount of bloodspray and gore, like the violence you'd see in a lot of really graphic 80's era anime OVAs. The woman whose face gets melted becomes a puddle of fleshy slush leaking across the floor. There's an odd fixation on these scenes, though. The film doesn't try to make them look or feel scary, but just fixates on the practical effects. It almost feels more like a demo reel for an ambitious SFX artist. A lot of the situations don't really have much grounding in the narrative, either. The woman whose face gets melted by acid randomly faints, and then the acid TIPS ITSELF onto her. The dude whose face and eyes gets eaten by spiders just falls over after reading a cursed book, and the spiders magically appear. People randomly turn into zombies, for no reason. The plot itself apparently concerns a woman taking possession of a building that has a gateway to hell below it, but, really the film doesn't care about this plot, and there's a very thin amount of narrative material connected A to B and so on. This is the "dreamlike" aspect of the film, I guess, but as a fan of legitimately good surrealist and dreamlike cinema, it feels to me more like an excuse for the complete disregard for plot, continuity, and character this film exhibits. It would be fine if setpieces were striking enough, the atmosphere and music were evocative enough (the score is particularly drab), but unless some Italian weirdo fixating on overly grotesque and obviously fake gore thrills you, I'd urge you to give this a pass. If this is Fulci's best film, then I believe this is the end of my journey with him.
I finally watched The Good Dinosaur at the recommendation of several users (I remember @RogerRoger being one) and found it to have the same charm and motivational message that all the Pixar films have. I’d say it’s on par with the recently viewed Onward although obviously a completely different setting.
For some reason The Good Dinosaur flew under the radar for me when it come out, and I don’t think it was marketed much. I also think it’s a poor choice of title. Not that the film isn’t about a good dinosaur. But I think the title undersells the heavier themes and it makes it sound like a simplistic kid show. Of course, it is a family oriented movie, but it has serious themes that are not just targeted at 5 year olds and that adults can enjoy (as is typical for these Disney Pixar projects). And in the true creative and imaginative style, it was just genius to make the humans animal-like and the animals human-like. Fantastic. I loved that. It was also a beautiful movie in 4K HDR10. The colors were very pleasing. It was an interesting contrast of realistic landscapes and detailed backdrop, with the cartoonish main character and dinosaurs.
@kyleforrester87 I didn’t hate Brightburn but I probably wouldn’t watch it again. In terms of recommendations, you’ve probably seen most of what I’d say. It depends on what you’re looking for though, something light or something a bit more thought-provoking? Think of it as on a scale from Dumb and Dumber to The Deer Hunter 😂😂
@nessisonett I should probably watch Deer Hunter again to be fair 😂
Well, I would like to see something like Midnight Special but if I say that people will start recommending films like Flight of the Navigator so I’m reluctant lol.
Some recent enjoyable movies I saw off the top of my head..
Midnight Run
VFW
Color Out of Space
Dragged Across Concrete
One Cut of the Dead
But really I’ll give most films a crack.
I wonder has anyone seen Beyond the Black Rainbow (director of Mandy)?
@kyleforrester87 Hmm, you’ve probably seen these but I’ll give it a go.
Unforgiven - slow burn Western with great visceral action
Good Time - another great thriller but not sure if you liked Uncut Gems or not cause it’s the same dudes
Under The Skin - a great subversion of E.T., Midnight Special and the like, and one of ScarJo’s best performances
Whiplash - I’d recommend it to anybody that hasn’t seen it but I reckon you probably have
@nessisonett thanks for all these, I’ll look into them and watch at least one over the weekend 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 (Under the Skin is the only one I know of, and I haven’t seen it!)
@LN78 Makes sense given most of the classic Westerns were originally samurai movies! That’s actually really cool they did one the other way and I should definitely check it out.
@RogerRoger Haha, yes indeed. Glad that I finally watched it and honestly I never would have if you and others hadn’t suggested it and it was so easy to just click it on a random evening while browsing Disney+. In the opening minutes I did start to question my theory about every Disney movie having the death of a family member, usually a parent, to be a central plot point. “This kid has two loving and healthy parents?! No way that this lasts.” ...and then, just like clockwork, we have the tragic death of the father. So Yeah, the recipe isn’t changed but the creativity and execution of the world and characters is what makes it so fun to watch. ...🤔 ya know, it’s kind of similar to Marvel’s Spider-Man in that regard. The formula isn’t groundbreaking but it’s all in the care of the execution.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
GoldenEye (Blu-Ray) - Next up in my Bond journey is the first entry of the 90's (and the first with Pierce Brosnan in Bond's shoes).
In this entry, Bond must track down a criminal organization that has stolen a powerful Soviet era satellite weapon that fries all electronic devices in it's attack range, and his search leads him to a surprising culprit.
It's noticeably an evolutionary entry for the series, but I think it strikes the perfect balance of modernization & tradition. In terms of action it's generally more high octane than past outings, with Bond & foes alike spraying machine guns everywhere, a destructively fun car chase involving a tank, and an impressive leap of faith off a mountaintop airfield in it's opening moments, though it also remains true to traditions in terms of offering a decent array of gadgets (nothing too campy, but it does feature a grappling belt, lazer watch, and a narratively important explosive pen). This balance of old & new also extends to the women in Bond's life, as although he's still as flirty and persuasive as ever, it's now balanced out by the fact that Judy Dench plays his no nonsense boss "M". Likewise, while the film's "Bond Girl" has a couple sultry scenes, she also comes across as a capable & necessary computer hacker (I personally would have preferred to see a bit more "cheesecake", but by this point the ratings scale was a bit more solidified, and they couldn't push the PG/PG-13 rating quite as much as they could in the late 70's & 80's, and I can't deny it still strikes a nice balance). Overall a nice first outing for Brosnan.
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
@RR529 That's a nicely written summary. Overall I think Goldeneye is very good, it has a lot of great moments. I do really like the main villain in it.
Forums
Topic: The Movie Thread
Posts 3,281 to 3,300 of 8,958
Please login or sign up to reply to this topic