Topic: The Movie Thread

I watched Train Dreams on Netflix last night, following a review touting it as one of the best films of 2025.
Not sure if I agree with that, but I can say that I truly loved it nonetheless. It is definitely not for everyone, as it is an almost meditative look at the life of a rather unremarkable man from his career as a railroad worker, logger and sawyer in the early 1900s up until his death in the late 1960s.
The movie is more or less just a collection of vignettes of various events in his life, few of which would be deemed remarkable enough to warrant inclusion in other films.
The cinematography is wonderful, truly bringing to life the Northern Midwest and Joel Edgerton is sublimely understated in his portrayal Add to that a fantastic and almost soothing narration by Will Patton and you have a very engaging look at the changing times of the first half of the twentieth century and one man's place in it all.
Many will no doubt bemoan that "nothing happens", which is both untrue and missing the point entirely.
Approach with caution, then, but if it clicks with you, you're in for a treat.

@Tjuz I think I just wanted to say that most Hollywood/movie romances are usually a big pile of vomit inducing s***e, or inherently boring and standardised, and lack any actual excitement or spark, designed almost to boost sales of flowers and chocolates, and thus I avoid consuming anything with that stereotype where possible, but I wanted to be less blunt about it 🤷‍♂️ this sounds like it veers onto the more realistic and grounded side of things, but I bet it falls in to some pretty standard tropes and roles, also, such is the overarching genre. At least this one will be quite a big deviation from standardised because of the specific themes featured. Do you not feel that, though? Romance, regardless of gender or orientation of those involved, is usually seen as this pretty standardised affair that you can kind of symbolise with a few key elements. People, in general, are quite boring, and I much prefer things that deviate from boring.

Am I about to lead a forum wide "weird" revolution? It isn't my intention, i'm certainly weird enough, but I only sprinkle a little of it in to some fairly normal topics here, relating to movies and games mostly 🧐 I feel like everyone here is more weird than they let on, too, so maybe we should embrace it more! At risk of a can of worms like none other being opened and doing irreparable damage, of course.

Finally saw ‘Weapons’ and…yeah, I loved it. A case study on the how you tell a story being more important than the story itself. What really did it for me though was the performances, which were phenomenal across the board.

@Metonymy I've said it before and it certainly bears repeating: Love, love, love that one! Still on track to be my favourite of the year and I don't really see any of the remaining planned cinema visits changing that. Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein came very, very close to toppling it, though, but ultimately I liked Weapons a tiny bit more

@FuriousMachine 🤫

Saw The Monkey over the weekend. Did not realise it would have so much dark humour, and it was probably all the better for it. Interestingly when the director Osgood Perkins was handed the script, it was originally dead pan serious which he then decided to change. I had a blast watching the most over the top death scenes I can remember seeing. Theo James (and the lad that plays the younger versions) was decent in it too.

I liked Osgood's previous film Longlegs, so will definitely be watching his next film Keepers when it comes to home viewing.

@JohnnyShoulder I absolutely agree, The Monkey was a lot of fun! Keeper is a very different film from both this and Longlegs, but I liked that one, too. I posted my thoughts on it a short while ago; if you're interested

@FuriousMachine It’s killing me but I still need to see Frankenstein! A few others as well before I can comfortably declare a best of the year. Weapons is definitely in the mix though 😄

@Ravix That could be us!

@Metonymy It's a beautiful movie! Hope you'll like it when you get around to it. The first hour is slightly on the slow side, but still very good - and then it gets great

@Metonymy It's probably one of the best movies of the year to be honest. I liked it so much that once the credits rolled I queued it up again and watched it a second all the way through to see what I missed. I'm still not sure if Weapons, Sinners or Frankenstein are my favorite movies of the year. It only makes it fair if you break-up Weapons into Horror, Sinners into a musical (which it really isn't) and then maybe call Frankenstein a Sci-fi movie (which it kind of is) then Predator Badlands gets Disney movie of the year (which sounds even more wrong than calling Sinners a musical)

finished watching the original Nicholals Hammond Amazing Spider-Man tv movie on youtube. movie's still fun to watch for old times sake. peter/spider man mostly did alot of actual building wall crawling and kept getting mind controlled throughout the movie.

tonight im watching the Chuck Norris Sidekicks movie on Tubi

@FuriousMachine I’m looking forward to it, thanks!

@JohnnyShoulder ‘The Monkey’ is in the mix for best of the year for me as well. Glad I’m not the only one who found it hilarious!

@GirlVersusGame You know a film’s done something interesting when you want to watch it again immediately. The trick is for it to get better with each watch, not worse!

@Metonymy Yes, you really do need to see Frakenstein, definitely one of the must see movies of the year!

@JohnnyShoulder Did you ever watch the making-of on Netflix? I'm of two minds to watch it because it's so well made that seeing behind the curtain might remove some of that magic. I did buy the screenplay but that's about it. I'd love to see what Guillermo del Toro could do with Dracula. He said that the Frankenstein you see in the 2025 movie is how he saw and drew him as a child. He never saw the monster as ugly, more as a man created from the strongest qualities of those people/parts. I think he maybe saw it as man being flawed but when brought together there was a kind of achievable perfection. He wrote a notebook a couple of years ago called The Cabinet of Curiosities, some may have been lost in translation but what he did say was quite fascinating. It chronicles all of his work, adds commentary and even features some of his sketches and artwork. Later tonight I'll post some, it's really interesting.

@GirlVersusGame No not seen the making of yet, but do want to. May save until after I watch it with my parents, as my Mum would like to see it.

Is that the same Cabinet of Curiosities series that was on Netflix? I do love a bit of design work from films, tv and video games. I should have more, but I only have a few wall hangings and some of the From Software books.

My niece works as a costume and make up artist in the film and tv industry, and like me is more into practical effects. She has made some pretty gnarly things over the years. Anyway, I'm desperate to hear what she thought of Nosferatu and Frankenstein seeing as they both leaned more towards physical effects and stuff.

@JohnnyShoulder It's just the name he gives to the Notebook, he took the name from the original Cabinets of Curiosity that were seen around Renaissance Europe. It was like a kind of mini museum where you'd feature odd things and objects found while traveling the world. They started to phase out home ones and give them a bit more of a respectful heir by replacing shrunken-heads with works of art. Technically The Wizard of Oz falls under that same banner because at the time it contained so many wonders and oddities, the theater was the Cabinet of Curiosity. It's something that's been more or less lost to time, kind of like a Memento Mori. People don't want to be reminded of death so they try to remove references of it from their homes/surroundings. Rob Zombie is a good modern example of someone who held onto the tradition but he grew up with as he puts it 'Carnies'. His actual name is Zombie, parts of his house are full of oddities, I can't think of anyone else who pulled it off that well.

A dress-maker friend said the exact same thing about Frankenstein and we never talk movies. She was absolutely captivated by the wardrobe design. They seemed to work backwards like with the evening gowns and usually that doesn't work but they combined so many prints and styles that it's flawless. (digging out the book)

The Mandrake, he was obsessed with these as a child apparently and wanted them in Pan's Labyrinth.

The thing at the end of his bed that haunted his dreams since a child.

Unseen story-boards he drew for Cronos. I love story-board art, now they are being replaced with sloppy A.I. to make the process faster especially if the script changes.

a page from his Devil's Backbone notes and designs.

You get the idea. Some directors keep sketch-books and note-books but they never see the light of day then you get ones like Twilight that while they have some nice drawings are obviously created for novelty. You can tell his wasn't, it's a lifetime of his work and musings.

MSZ: Let’s talk, then, about how you started drawing—how you started synthesizing all these influences and finding a voice that was your own.

GDT: Well, I started drawing very young because I was illustrating my horror stories. But the three creatures I drew obsessively were the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Frankenstein monster, and Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. But obsessively—when I was eating ice cream, or on a bicycle. . . .

MARY SHELLEY (1797–1851)

Much like Matthew G. Lewis, who was only twenty years old when he wrote The Monk, Mary Shelley was painfully young—a teenager, in fact—when she first published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and into the monster and his tale she was able to pour all her contradictions and her questions—her essential pleas and her feelings of disenfranchisement and inadequacy. The tale spoke about such profound, particular feelings that, irremediably, it became universal.

While reading the novel as a child, I was arrested by the epistolary form Shelley had chosen (and which Bram Stoker would use in Dracula to good effect many decades later), because it felt so immediate. I was overtaken by the Miltonian sense of abandonment, the absolute horror of a life without a reason. The tragedy of the tale was not dependent on evil. That’s the supreme pain of the novel—tragedy requires no villain.

Frankenstein is the purest of parables—working both as a straight narrative and as a symbolic one. Shelley utilizes the Gothic model to tell a story not about the loss of a paradise but rather about the absence of one.

The novel is so articulate and vibrant that it often surprises those who approach it for the first time. No adaptation—and there are some masterful ones—has ever captured it whole.

Taking its rightful place among the essential characters in any narrative form, Frankenstein’s creature goes beyond literature and joins Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio, and Monte Cristo in embodying a concept, even in the minds of those who have never read the actual book.

GDT: Meat Market is a story that is really close to my heart. At one point, it was called Meat Market: A Love Story. It was supposed to be like Phantom of the Opera set in a huge meat processing plant. The super-commercial pitch is: “Hamlet in a meat market, by way of Phantom of the Opera.”

Ernie, our star and son of a meat-processing mogul, falls in love with Ofelia. And Ernie’s uncle has killed his father to get the meat processing plant. But Ernie has been blamed for the murder and goes and hides in the sewers full of chunks of rotting meat. Eventually, he comes back to rescue Ofelia.
And I was going to have Ron Perlman play Ernie. So I tried to write it for him. And the idea was that Ernie was this baby who had been dropped and had his face broken on the concrete. They had to put him together the best they could, and he became sort of a mixture of the Phantom of the Opera and the Frankenstein monster. If I had Ron at age thirty-five, I would endeavor to find the money to actually make it.

He mentions Frankenstein so much in the book, it's clear the novel made such of an impression on him and actually featured just out of sight in everything he's done. I didn't type that out I ran a sort of barcode scanner over the pages (there's no way I was going to try)

@GirlVersusGame That's a fantastic book. I have a few different ones that he's done, Pacific Rim is a good one with all the kaiju designs and the little bit of world building mentioned in the book, makes me a little sad he didn't do the sequel.

@MightyDemon82 I didn't know about that one, I haven't seen Pacific Rim yet. I have most if not all of his fiction books but added them to the rainy day pile. I did want to read Pan's Labyrinth again but it's a little too soon I think. I have some of his drawing books too I'll have a look you might not have seen those.

His foreword on Day of the Dead Book 'The Art of The Book of Life'

His 'How to Draw Dragons' Book, a little faded. It goes deep into the history and lore of dragons from Egyptology to Nordic traditions. I'm sure I had another one of his drawing books and another Pan's Labyrinth book that including lots of production sketches. I'm just glad he still uses his own sketches and finds a way to share them. It's sort of a lot art in Hollywood, and hopefully I won't be saying the same thing about the games industry.

It turns out I might have that Pacific Rim book after all, it was buried well between some Transformers art-books. I'm not a big fan of the movies, there's something a little nerving about a car coming to life and Michael Bay uses too much lens flare, but I do like the designs.

@GirlVersusGame Wow, I want those. Who doesn't want books with Dragons!

As for Micheal Bay's Transformers, I agree with you. The first was ok, but after that they got too loud and flashy for me. You may like Bumblebee though. A sweet film not directed by Bay

@GirlVersusGame @MightyDemon82 I'll second the love for Bumblebee, it was such a welcome diversion from the Bayhem that is the other Transformers movies. I agree that the first one is OK, but the rest are mostly a loud, chaotic mess. I did like the last one, though, the something-something-Beasts one.
And Pacific Rim is brilliant in its sheer, unadulterated mech vs kaiju spectacle and I think GDT is one of the very few who could make a movie like that properly work without it devolving into something akin to a Bay Transformers movie.