Topic: Movie thread.

Planning to watch:

• Rashomon
• Bridge on the River Kwai
• Lupin III: The Gold of Babylon
• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
• Princess Mononoke
• Surf's Up
• RocknRolla

Haha, I've spent all my time posting about movies on PushSquare.

Watched Teen Titans Go to the Movies on release week. It's the best superhero-themed movie I've seen so far this year!

Also saw the new Mission Impossible. It's fun, even if all the masks and double-identities make me feel like I'm watching Scooby-Doo at times.

@Vinny Princess Mononoke is AMAZING. One of my favorite films of all time. It's a much more nuanced and elegant take on the same sort of themes he first explored in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

I've also been on a bit of a tear with Lupin the Third lately. These last few weeks, I've watched Castle of Cagliostro, Dead or Alive, Farewell to Nostradamus, and the bulk of the currently airing fifth season of the TV show so far.

@Ralizah Watched Castle of Cagliostro december last year. Extremely charming and the soundtrack is perfection.
The Secret of Mamo is great too, but some people are split on the sci fi elements later on.

Gold of Babylon is gonna get re released this year by discotek media, currently it's kinda hard to find.

Saw Christopher Robin recently. Good movie, but crushingly sad in the first half.

Finished watching The Pacific (2010) series.
Absolutely amazing. It's a series I will never forget.

Anyone up to watching badly a dubbed kung fu movie
7steps of kung fu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2juVV9kwpbo

Watched Princess Mononoke (1997) saturday and Spirited Away (2001) sunday.
Gonna watch Grave of the Fireflies this week.

The Giver (TNT) - Caught this yesterday afternoon. It had an interesting premise (a story of people fighting to regain human emotion & free will, even though it may weaken the safety of their "utopian" society), but too much was left unexplained, such as there not being enough back story, and the ending didn't make much sense.there's a barrier around the city that dulls it's citizens' humanity, but for some reason it just shuts down if the main character, who is one of the few characters who is allowed his humanity, walks beyond it's border.

Ex Machina (Netflix) - Very interesting watch. A coder for the world's largest search engine company wins a chance of a lifetime to live with a week with the company's reclusive founder. When he arrives he learns that the founder is working on groundbreaking AI technology, but in a very suspenseful film, neither the founder or the AI are quite what they seem.

"The Nun" was dreadful. Based on the trailer, and putting into consideration the franchise it is a part of, I was fine with it simply offering one jump scare after another. I get it: There's an audience for that.

But it couldn't even do that right. It uses the same setup and the same number of beats before the would-be jump scare. There was an over reliance on CGI for the experience to be tactile or convincing.There was nothing scary about it other than how miserable of an experience it was.

The location was perfect for a horror film but the screenplay offers less than nothing. (It takes place in a castle/nunnery.)

I was watching the old documentary "Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark where he looks at various old architecture from the romans, greeks etc.

In the first episode they look at an Island that was inhabited by early Christians:

Holy crap, that's literally the island they used for Luke's hermit island in the Last Jedi.

So I watched a gob of movies on vacation, and I thought I'd post little rants about them, in descending order for favorite to least favorite.

The Incredibles 2 - The biggest surprise for me. What a fantastic little movie! This goes more interesting places than the original, and continues with that film's family-friendly superhero deconstruction storyline. The family drama is well-written, the writing is often surprisingly intelligent, the action is engaging, the social commentary and metaphor is certainly there, but handled with a measure of grace, and I actually really liked the villain. The setting, again, is interesting: what people might have thought the future would look like decades ago.
Score: 9/10

Black Panther - I'm not sure I'm fully on-board with the racial politics of this film, but it's an intelligent, interesting, well-paced action movie and I enjoyed watching it. Reminds me of the original Iron Man in certain ways, actually.
Score: 8.5/10

Solo: A Star Wars Story - OK, whatever, yes, the way Han gets his last name is stupid. No argument here. It's sad that this film bombed like it did, though, because it was incredibly charming. Great performances all-around. It's a fun blockbuster with a very classic and time-worn plot, but it WORKS, and, to be honest, this is tied with Rogue One as my favorite of the Disney Star Wars films. These prequels are way more fun than the mainline SW films. If it suffers from one problem, though, it's that, like a lot of modern blockbusters, it can get way too loud and chaotic at times. Still a good time, though.
Score: 7.5/10

Coco - A predictably written but unsurprisingly emotionally resonant film. This is polished Disney being polished Disney. I still think Book of Life was a more interesting take on Mexican mythology, though. The film is gorgeous in 3D, too.
Score: 7/10

The Nun - A big disappointment after the surprisingly scary Annabelle: Origins. The atmosphere is on-point near the beginning, but the film doesn't go anywhere interesting, and the monsters near the end are straight up ridiculous. Not quite as bad as The Conjuring 2 or the original Annabelle, but still not great.
Score: 4.5/10

Thor: Ragnarok - WHAT A MESS! Seriously, this film is a total mess. It wants so hard to be "cool" and "funny," but it just comes off as cringe-inducingly flippant. The film just... does stuff, and you watch, flabbergasted. I will give it this, though: it's more fun to watch than Infinity War, and it's hilarious to see Jeff Goldblum not even bother acting in his role. He doesn't act! Half the time the man is wearing an expression that might be read as "I can't believe they're paying me tons of money to sit in a chair and just be Jeff Goldblum!" The bad guy is Thor's sister, and she's apparently very powerful, but there's no logic to who is so powerful, and why some characters become more powerful. Force of will, I guess. It's like watching Dragonball Z.
Score: 3.5/10

Avengers: Infinity War - A loud, mindless, and sometimes frustratingly poorly-written action movie. The whole plot is a dull McGuffin hunt. The film is filled with long, tedious fight scenes, because there's really no plot here: just a premise ("Bad guy want to get stones to kill a bunch of people") and characters reacting to that premise ("We gotta stop bad guy from getting stones!"). No time is spent developing Thanos at all: he utters some vague Malthusian logic to justify wiping out trillions of lives throughout the universe, and... HE'S OFF. Why is his design so boring, by the way? He looks like one of the random aliens you kill in the Gears of War games. Anyway, the stakes are apparently high, but this doesn't stop the characters from acting incredibly stupid throughout so that they can justify drawing this out for far longer than it should, and even setting it up for a sequel! Some of the character moments are fun, but this is a surprisingly bad film. Oh, and can we talk about the edginess of this film? This is a very edgy Marvel film. Lots of suffering and talk about genocide. It's all treated in such an adolescent manner, though. I refuse to believe anyone other than a teenager experiencing a rush of hormones wrote this script. Finally, I don't appreciate the writers clearly trying to milk drama by killing characters you know they won't even leave dead. This film won't even have the decency to accept the consequences of its events, marks my words.
Score: 3/10

Thor: The Dark World - I couldn't follow this. I hate this movie. It's boring. The characters are all non-entities. One of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Score: 1/10

i just started watching it for the first time, after watching Band of Brothers for the 4th time or so.

I'm catching up on horror films. I just watched The Ring and it was rather boring. The Lord of the Rings had more scary moments than this movie and it's certainly a better watch.

Planning to watch Halloween (1987) next. Horror recommendations are welcome. I'm not easily scared, but I'm not into extreme gore or other distasteful stuff like the Human Centipede... ugh

@BMO_Advanced I may be in the minority but I actually think the American remake of "The Ring" is a better made picture than the original Japanese "Ringu." For me, it had the better pacing and more potent horror imagery. But then again I'm not easily scared by Asian cinema, particularly in how ghosts or apparitions are portrayed. Of course, there are exceptions, particularly the Pang brothers' "The Eye."

And you mean the original "Halloween" from 1978, right? That's one of my favorite movies. I watch it every Halloween and must've seen it more than 20 times. I admired how focused it is in terms of craft and also in terms of storytelling. Masked psychopath kills babysitters in Haddonfield, Illinois. The plot is to-the-point, unlike so many modern horror films where plots have so much padding and special and visual effects so ostentatious that they end up diluting the overall experience.

Some horror movies I recommend: "Absentia" (2011), "The Christmas Tale" (2005), "The Devil's Candy" (2015), "Ravenous" (1999)

@Ralizah I really enjoyed "Thor: Ragnarok" because the previous entries were such bottom-of-the-barrel material (and boring!) that the change of tone and pacing is a nice surprise. I understand, however, that the brand of humor is not for everyone. I loved Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's "What We Do in the Shadows" and wanted more of it, so it was interesting to see how that type of humor would translate to a Marvel film. For the most part, it worked for me. But you're right: the characterization and some of the logic needed to be ironed out further.

@BMO_Advanced The original Halloween (from 1978) is a fantastic film. Other horror recommendations...

Have you seen...
The Babadook?
Kairo?
Alien?
Night of the Living Dead?

All wonderful classics. None are terribly gory.

@Franz I mean, I agree, Ragnarok, while not a good film, was at least entertaining. Thor: The Dark World was, as you aptly put it, bottom-of-the-barrel material. I don't quite remember the original, but I know I wasn't impressed with it, either. Somewhat cloying facetiousness is better than pure mediocrity.

@Franz Woops yeah. Thanks for the recommendations, I don't think I've seen any of those. I also have yet to watch The Babadook and The Silence of the Lambs. I just happened to watch the Ring first because Netflix added it. Maybe I should save Halloween for Halloween.

I also enjoyed both Thor: Ragnarok and Infinity War. I wouldn't say they're the most intellegent movies, but I have a lot of fun watching them and I think their execution is excellent in the humour and action department, not to forget sound and visuals. Who watches these movies for the story really?

@Ralizah I love Alien! It's one of my favourites. Though, I almost do not consider Alien a horror movie, maybe that's because I've seen it so many times. I haven't seen the other three so thanks

Ringu (the Japanese one) was boring, and The Ring took similar material and made it worse by adding in too much CGI and taking away any sense of dread or anticipation.

The Babadook is probably the best Western-created horror film of the 21st century. It's absolutely essential cinema.

The Silence of the Lambs isn't really a horror film, and I'm uncomfortable with the transphobia baked into the plot, but it's still a great watch, and something any serious lover of the medium should see.

@BMO_Advanced Be sure to post your impressions of Halloween when you get around to it! People lump it in with stuff like Friday the 13th because it properly kickstarted the slasher subgenre, but the direction and pacing of the film are amazing, and some of the cinematography was just outstanding (the opening scene is still as effective today as the day the film came out: it's so well-constructed).

Just finished watching A Nightmare on Elm Street for my Halloween night movie. The original one, and it's the first time I've watched it.

I really didn't find it scary (even watched it alone with the lights off, lol), but I still enjoyed watching it. It had an interesting premise, and I'll admit to being surprised by the ending (I generally like going back and watching 80's movies too, so that probably helped as well).

Also watched Deadpool 2 recently which was pretty good.