Topic: The Movie Thread

@LN78 Pretty sure it was in my VHS copy many years ago. I've not personally seen the movie on any format since. Still, it seems we've both seen a British release with it in before.

@BearsEatBeets @LN78 Have no idea, as I've not seen the film in god know how long and don't remember that scene.

I actually watched more films in 2023 than I realised.

Here are my top 10. What did everyone else think of 2023's output?

1. Godzilla minus one
2. The Boy & The Heron.
3.Oppenheimer
4. John Wick Chapter 4
5. Shin Kamen Rider
6. Spider-man: Across the spider-verse
7. American Symphony
8.The Creator
9.Puss in Boots: The last Wish
10.TMNT : Mutant Mayhem

Still plenty to watch that isn't released in the UK yet. I'm Looking forward to The Iron Claw & Poor Things in particular.

Just finished watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I absolutely loved it! It's quite possibly the best movie adaptation of a video game franchise ever. So many great moments and so many Nintendo characters. Not to mention the music! As a person who grew up with Nintendo, this movie just hit all the right notes for me. Such a fantastic movie, I'm so glad that I watched it. It really made me happy.

i still need to deal with my watch list on disneyplus. Them marvel movies along with Luca and Cheetah and the old 1980s Spider-Man cartoon and the 1990s Hulk cartoon and the early 2000s X Men Evolution

@MightyDemon82 I haven't seen that many 2023 films all things considered, but I can still put together a top 5 of highlights I suppose:

1) Poor Things
2) Monster
3) Infinity Pool
4) Talk to Me
5) Joy Ride

So basically... enjoy Poor Things! Let me know what you think when you've had the chance to see it. I loved Puss in Boots too, but can't include it myself as I saw it last year. Also, a shout-out to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which finished the trilogy as it lived: the only films worth anything within the MCU.

@Tjuz Another fan of Infinity Pool I see! It was a bit messes up, and all the better for it! I really liked the wierd things it did with the soundtrack too.

Just finished watching Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). I was in a mood to finally watch this movie as I finished Tomb Raider: Legend yesterday.

It was overall a decent movie, nothing special. Some of the scenes looked really cool, perhaps a bit over-the-top. As for the story, it never felt like it reached any high points and as a result, it was rather underwhelming.

I also didn't like how Lara already knew the answer to everything in the movie. There were never any moments where you as a viewer would figure things out together with her. She just knew exactly what to do in every situation and sometimes the movie didn't even explain what she did. Like in one scene, she takes a laser pointer, points it at a time rift or whatever you want to call it, then threw the ancient clock in there and it split into each of its different components and she just takes one of them and puts it into the triangle, therefore activating time control. Literally no explanation whatsoever for that scene, let's just roll with it I guess lol. So weird.

Anyway, it was overall a decent movie but I'll probably forget about it in a couple of days lol. I'm curious though to see if the sequel is any better.

I did not know that the director of Sideways and The Descendants had a film out last year called The Holdovers, staring Paul Giamatti. I will definitely be checking that out!

watching these

Blu ray/ DVD
Captain America the First Avenger
Iron Man
Incredible Hulk

DIsneyplus
-Captain Marvel
-Iron Man 2 but might watch it on Myvudi since MyVudu has the regular better bonus features behind the scenes for Iron Man 2
Cheetah
the rest of the 1995 Incredible Hulik cartoon

Netflix
L.A. Confidential
Society of the Snow which is pretty much a remake of Alive

@JohnnyShoulder Absolutely! I still haven't watched Possessor yet even though I've nearly pressed play on it a bunch of times, but when I saw Infinity Pool as a fresh release from the same director I just gave it a shot. Knew nothing about it going in but was very pleasantly surprised! Such a fun concept with a real star performance from Mia Goth, but she's really made this her niche now so not all that surprising on that front haha.

@PixelDragon Oof. I absolutely hated Hellraiser when I watched it for the first time last year, so I hope you have a better experience with it! It must be a classic for a reason.

watching L.A. Confidential on Netflix tonight right now.

then for physical DVD/blu ray Im rewatching Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Norton Incredible Hulk and Thor and Avengers before i jump into Thor Dark World and Captain America Winter Soldier which are on Disneyplus.

not sure if i want to watch Iron Man 3 since the story's not that great except for Stark creating drones and the start of Jarvis/Vision

@Tjuz Indeed, Mia Goth had a break through last couple of years! I enjoyed Possesser just as much and it had a similar pool. Definitely a chip off the same block as his father!

Watched Mission Impossible 3 and 4 the past couple of days. The third movie was terrible, I didn't like how the focus was on the love interest and not on, you know, the mission. The fourth movie rectified this and it was brilliant, I enjoyed it a lot! Hopefully the next movie won't deviate like the third one did.

@LN78 Dunkirk was awesome. Not exactly one of his most memorable films, but a very tightly-directed and accomplished production.

Tops for me will always be The Dark Knight. Every frame of that film is incredible, and it remains my favorite superhero movie to date.

But yeah, TDKR is trash lol

@LN78 I have yet to watch it, but I've heard nothing but great things. I've seen people compare it to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is one of my favourite films of all-time. If you've seen it, would you agree with that comparison? If not, all the more reason to check that one out!

@RogerRoger Ah okay. I might actually watch it this weekend as I finished watching other movies this week. Glad to hear that I'm not the only one who feels like that about the third Mission Impossible.

So I've watched Jurassic World: Dominion and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation this week. The former was really good, possibly the best of the World trilogy. The first movie was a good "reboot" or whatever you want to call it of the first Jurassic Park as it expanded on the idea of what it'd be like if there actually were people there and not simply an experiment. The second movie seemed more like preparation for the third movie rather than its own thing. It didn't really have a strong concept in all honesty. But the third movie went all out in that dinosaurs are roaming the entire Earth once again, which is very interesting to me! So I think the third one had the best and most interesting concept of the World trilogy.

The fifth Mission Impossible movie was also really good! I'm glad it switched things up rather than being another traditional MI plot. I'm also glad that it brought back characters from the previous movie instead of changing them out like they do in every movie. I actually liked the characters in the fourth movie. And yeah, the plot is also focused this time around, so I didn't find anything wrong with it. Another great Mission Impossible movie!

I've just watched Saltburn, I very much now understand why "murder on the dance floor" seems to have resurfaced in the UK music charts!! It's deliciously weird and dark! The decision to show it in 4:3 with text font that feels like it's from a late 70s movie, with the 2000s "tunes" and ultra modern dolby digital hdr really shouldn't all work together but it totally does though. Some wicked performances, Richard E Grant and Rosalind Pike as posh ***** are absolutely fantastic but Barry Keogh absolutely nails it. Rare that a movie shocks me but there are a couple of moments in this movie that genuinely do.

So I started my "year at the cinema" with Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos. Now, I have more or less avoided his earlier films because they felt too "quirky" or "weird" to me. As an example, Wes Anderson's movies (after "Rushmore", which I liked) just feel "off" to me... The Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic etc plays to me being weird for weirdness sake and does little else than annoy me. I was sure that Lanthimos movies would be same for me, but from all I heard, this one was unmissable and I'm nothing if not willing challenge my preconceptions and attempt to broaden my horizons every once in a while.

So, my verdict? I honestly don't know, but the short answer is that I didn't really like it. Interestingly, I was worried that the quirky humour and weirdness would lose me, but that was actually what I found to be the movie's strong points. Emma Stone's performance is out of this world, and Dafoe and Ruffalo deliver great roles too (even though Ruffalo's character really grated on me... which was by design, but that didn't change the fact that I hated every scene he was in). Speaking of performances, Jerrod Carmichael's very subtle character really stood out in a movie where everyone else were going very large and loud.

So what was my problem with it? Well, length for one... I was so ready for the movie to be over long before we hit the 2 hour mark... also, while I truly found the central idea fascinating (don't know how much of Bella's "circumstance" is known through marketing, so I will refrain from going into details), I felt that the execution floundered quite seriously as she embarked on her "adventure". Yeah, sexual awakening and exploration is a vital part of growing up and building one's identity, but it seemed to be more or less the only thing the filmmaker was interested in exploring once Bella discovered her sexuality.. I actually got bored with all the sex scenes and I can't really tell if that's a good thing or not... all I know is that I felt that maybe we didn't need to spend quite that much of the movie's runtime exploring all the quirky ways people have sex?

The movie wasn't really overly long, it's just that it spent so much time exploring the same themes when it really should have explored different aspects of Bella's exploration that it actually got somewhat boring after a while. The movie spends ten, maybe fifteen, minutes on Bella's discovery of the cruel world of poverty and inequality and, after her stating that she wants to make the world a better place, moves swiftly on to a half an hour of her having sex as a prostitute with a variety of graphic encounters with an equally varied set of kinks.

The final 15-20 minutes or so (after she returned home from Paris) got truly interesting again, but at that point I was more or less worn out and it seemed like the filmmaker lost interest as well at that point. as it felt half-assed and tacked on.

Interestingly, I realize that this write-up makes it seem like I hated the movie, but that's really not the case. I can truly see why it is as loved as it is, but it really was not my cup of tea and I will probably continue to give Lanthimos' movies a miss in the future.

@LN78 I caught this the other evening.... "The Talented Mr Ripley" for GenZ!

Objectively, I can attest that Saltburn is probably not a very good movie.... but subjectively it was quite an enjoyable watch - albeit I felt I needed a shower afterwards ha! The attempted social commentary was lacklustre, and instead it seemed moreso that the narrative was just racing towards one outlandish set-piece to the next (the bathtub - - > the meeting on the stairs - -> the grave - ->the dance!!)

Barry Keoghan is a fine actor, but his accent was incredibly distracting throughout... think he should have just played it straight Irish as opposed to this psuedo-Liverpudlian attempt. It made me appreciate just how talented Cillian Murphy is (another IRE actor) when it comes to the Birmingham accent in Peaky Blinders.

Saltburn was a very fun watch for sure, to give it some dues, but certainly far from the masterpiece that some people would have you believe.