Topic: Movie thread.

Since Alien was the last film in my last batch, I've ordered my next set of Blu-Rays.

• A View to a Kill - the next Bond movie in line. I was going to get Never Say Never Again next (even though it's apparently not proper Bond), but it must not have had a rerelease in awhile. Walmart only has it through a 3rd party seller offering it for over $150! Heck, even the DVD was $60 or something like that. Needless to say I'm not spending that much on a movie, so I'm skipping it.
• Godzilla VS King Ghidorah - the 90's version, comes in a double pack with the 90's Godzilla VS Mothra. I was going to get Godzilla VS Biollante, as it was next in-line after 1984/5 (which I last watched), but apparently Walmart only has it as an in-store purchase only, so I'll have to look for it next time I go.
• Godzilla VS Mothra - Look above.
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High - I tend to enjoy 80's teen films (and have seen parts of it before), so I've decided to get it.
• Starship Troopers - A violent sci-fi epic with a more humorous tone (a satire of nationalist militarism), I've always liked it.

Well, Never Say Never is basically Thunderball, @RR529 .... Did you see original version of that?
Are you going onto Aliens, then? Definitely recommend that & Predator?

@BruceCM, I'm sure I've seen Thunderball before (or at least parts of it), as we used to have a movie channel that would show all the older Bond films (Connery through Brosnan) ad nauseum a couple times a year, but as silly & shallow as it may sound, I really don't find myself enjoying movies made before the 80's.

Don't get me wrong, there are exceptions, but the 60's and earlier 70's Bond films really aren't among them.

EDIT: And yes, I'll definitely be checking out Aliens in the future.

Well A Clockwork Orange was pretty controversial when it came out, it was banned in the UK for a while or at least pulled. Many critics loved it but there was still a significant backlash.

A better example of a Kubrick movie that was panned at the time and reassessed later is The Shining.

In any case, I loved Joker, I think most of the backlash to it is pretty cynical and disingenuous.

Also also, sorry for being late to the party on this discussion.

Eh, the Connery & Moore Bonds were good, if you saw them as a child.... @RR529 I'd agree, most of those don't hold up so well as an adult, especially without the nostalgia helping
You got Aliens on DVD or Blu-Ray, right? So, it has the longer Director's Cut? It's definitely worth watching that instead of the original theatrical release

@BruceCM, yeah, I got it on Blu-Ray & watched the Director's Cut version.

@BruceCM Brosnan was honestly the perfect Bond actor in my opinion

GoldenEye is easily my favorite Bond film to date, while I also think Tomorrow Never Dies and TWINE are pretty heavily underrated

Die Another Day was something that happened

It was never actually banned in the UK though, the version that was approved and released in the UK was actually less censored (basically more rapey) than the US version. Kubrick withdrew the film in the UK as he couldn't bothered with people/newspapers complaining about it. It's why only once he died it got re-released by the studio.

On a side note there's a place in London called Scala that use to be a famous cinema and they decided to show a Clockwork Orange after Kubrick pulled it anyway, however they then got spanked hard by Kubrick's lawyers for doing it so it was converted into a music venue after the owners went bankrupt.

I've watched Joker two times and I absolutely loved it. I just love this movie.
The music, the visuals, Joaquin's performance...
Movie of the Year for me.

I’m not going to do an in-depth review of these films, but just watched Buio Omega (Beyond the Darkness) and Antropophagus by Joe D’Amato. I’ve never seen any films by this director, but both surprised me by surpassing my expectations.

Buio Omega was a pretty sleazy affair overall, but it was really well done and even had some memorable characters. There are a couple of scenes where you may ask yourself “why am I watching this?”, but sticking out was worth it for me.

Antropophagus starts off as your standard “killer on the loose” type of movie, but it gets better as it progresses. The setting of the isolated island feels really atmospheric at times. The stench of decay and malice surround the film and had me imagining some of the horrible deeds that took place in the past. George Eastman is brilliant as the killer in this film and honestly is up there with the most repulsive villains I’ve seen in horror flicks.

Recommend both of these movies to fans of 70s and 80s exploitation/ giallo.

That was my very first Godzilla movie, i loved the Super X. I've always wanted a ship like that of my own.

BTW, anybody here watched Rambo 5? i was going to watch it in the local movie theater, but i forgot. Was it good? was it bad? how were the fight scenes? I loved the previous Rambo movie from 2008.

@BlackTalon2
I saw Rambo 4 also and loved It! That was the first one i got to see in the theaters. I was too young when the others came out. The non stop brutality and balls to the wall action was fantastic! Probably the most kills I'd seen on film since robocop! As for Part 5 I hear it's mostly good but haven't seen it yet. I just have one dislike though. Where's his trademark Mullet? He doesn't look right without the long hair.

@Zeldafan79 i missed it in the movie theaters so i will probably look for th DvD. ill probably buy the Rambo 4/2008 dvd too as part of my library.

@BlackTalon2, yeah, the fight between Godzilla & the Super X was pretty well done.

Watching the Generation Kill series.
1 episode to go.

Planning to watch:

• Rescue Dawn
• End of Evangelion
• True Grit
• Batman: Gotham by Gaslight
• We need to talk about Kevin

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Blu-Ray) -80's movie that follows the happenings of various high school students throughout a year.

The characters' exploits in love & sex, mall culture, the workforce & more are explored & it's pretty interesting seeing how youth culture was seen at the time. While it mostly strikes a more lighthearted situational comedy tone (the exchanges between stoner student Spicoli & rigid teacher Mr Hand never fail to raise a chuckle), it can delve into some heavier material (such as an abortion subplot, which was probably pretty heavy for the time), making it a pretty well rounded watch.

Midway (Theatre) - Film retelling the events of the Battle of Midway during WWII.

It isn't a heavy or sombre war story in any way. Largely focusing on a group of airmen (though it does feature an intelligence officer on the strategy side of things as a subplot), the battle is recreated as a big budget CGI thrill ride with a raucous, rah rah, attitude.

That said, if you can get over it's depiction of the war, the thrilling air combat, as embellished as it is, is exciting, and as a long time fan of things like Ace Combat, I enjoyed it.

@RR529 did you happen to catch They Will Not Grow Old? It's a WW1 film Peter Jackson worked on, where they restored a ton of old footage, and used old BBC audio.

Watched two movies recently. The newest Makoto Shinkai film Weathering With You and Sam Mendes' Oscar buzzy 1917.

Weathering With You is... a film I'm conflicted about. On one hand, like all of Shinkai's films (even the short, low-budget ones he made at home), it's beautifully animated. Moreso than any of his previous works, Weathering is a work of pure visual art, making every second of this nearly two-hour film entrancing to look at. The attention to detail in the environments is nearly photorealistic this time around, and simple sequences of, say, rain hitting the neon-lit pavement of dark Tokyo streets (and, good god, will you see a lot of rain in this film) will leave one gawking in wonder at the sheer artistry on display. The soundtrack, prominently featuring songs from indie rock band Radwimps, whose music also featured heavily in Shinkai's previous film, is mostly excellent. The film is filled with realistic, likable personalities, and it's fun to watch them interacting on-screen.

The issues I have relate partially to the concept of the film, partially to the tone, and partially to the structure of it overall. In Weathering, we follow a young runaway named Hodaka who tries to survive on the unforgiving streets of Tokyo before being taken in Keisuke Suga, a man who had saved his life on the trip there and who, we come to find, runs a small publication dedicated to yellow journalism. The city of Tokyo (and, presumably, other parts of the world) is suffering from an endless rainfall (while the actual origin of this phenomenon isn't given much focus in the film, it seems to be some sort of new, abnormal climate phenomenon). After being taken in by Keisuke and helping him to write for the paper, Hodaka comes across a young girl named Hina, a so-called weather maiden or "sunshine girl," who is able to use mysterious powers to temporarily will away the rain. Hodaka convinces Hina, who is struggling to pay the bills for herself and her younger brother after the death of her only parent, to start a business and use her business to help enrich herself.

There's obviously more that happens, but this is the basic setup of the film. Unlike most of the auteur's films, it's a bit of an involved set-up, and it takes awhile to get going. There's too much going on thematically, between the implicit social satire, the weird mythology surrounding weather maidens, the elaborate climate change analogy (an element of the film that's just sort of hand-waved away at the end without much consideration), as well as at least one momentous moral decision made near the end that makes me wish the film had reflected to some degree on its wholesale rejection of utilitarianism.

What's here is certainly interesting, but it doesn't really help the plot. Previous Shinkai films work so well because they're always about people in love who find some sort of overwhelming social or natural force coming between them. That... exists here as well, to some extent, but it's much less totalizing and, as a result, much less impactful.

Which leads me into my biggest issue with the film: it's almost completely lacking in the overwhelming sense of longing and loss that has typified his work since the very beginning. Part of this is, as has been mentioning, the lack of stakes in this film compared to a lot of his other previous work (particular Your Name and Voices of a Distant Star, but also, in a more grounded and perhaps devastating sense, 5 Centimeters Per Second). More generally, though, the sense of 'mono no aware' generally found in his work is almost nowhere to be seen here. The sense of deep loneliness, pain, and longing for connection that forms the emotional core of his work is somewhat muted here (beyond the very beginning of the film, when we find out how tough it is to survive in Tokyo as a runaway with nothing to his name), and the result is that the film's climax doesn't smack you with the same emotional impact as most of his other work (although I can, perhaps, do without something so emotionally potent that it ends up putting me in a melancholic funk for days on end, like after the first time I viewed 5 Centimeters Per Second).

I've tried to avoid mentioning Your Name to this point, but, honestly, the film practically invites invitations to Shinkai's breakout 2016 masterwork. Both films feature plots that mix elements of Eastern mysticism, teen romance, coming-of-age dramas, magical realism, and disaster flicks. Both films feel distinctly YA-oriented. The Radwimps music, which so helped to distinguish Your Name from Shinkai's previous work, also perpetuates the feeling that Weathering is more in line with that film than anything else Shinkai has made in the past. Most importantly, though, Weathering's plot structure is very similar to the basic structure of Your Name, despite the content not really justifying it. I think, despite his amazing success, Shinkai will only wither as a talent if he doesn't allow himself to escape from the influence of his previous film. It also really doesn't help that, as decent as it is (I know my post sounds negative, but I really did quite enjoy my time with this film), Weathering fares poorly when compared to Your Name, which was, in turns, funny, deeply romantic, brilliantly crafted (the mid-film twist was so devastating and well-done), and ultimately far more than the sum of its parts.

This impression sound distinctly negative, but I don't really mean it to. Weathering With You is a beautifully animated and deeply enjoyable little film that I'd recommend to almost anyone. It's better than the vast majority of films released in a given year (and certainly a good deal better than several of Shinkai's own underwhelming mid-career films, which often lacked the sense of identity that made 5 Centimeters and *Voices *so memorable), and I had a smile on my face almost the entire time I watched it. But, as a fan of Shinkai's work, and especially coming on the heels of one of the greatest animated films of all time, I feel like one was just not quite as good as I was hoping it'd be. Take that less as a condemnation of this particular film and more of a sign of my deep respect for Shinkai as an artist.

As for 1917... look, the film is going to win awards, and I'm cool with that. It's certainly interesting enough. But the film feels gimmicky. For those who don't know, it's a WW1 drama about two English soldiers who are tasked with crossing a large amount of terrain to call off an attack that'll otherwise lead to 1500 or so troops being ambushed and slaughtered by German forces. That's the setup for this film, but it's also the bulk of the plot, if it can even be said to have one. The gimmick behind this film is that the entire thing feels like it's composed of one unbroken shot throughout (like other films that do this, of course, it's actually not, and clever editing is used to hide the seams), sort of like the recent God of War game. I suppose the intention was to immerse the viewer in the immediacy of the setting, which I initially hoped it might, but the effect, instead, was sort of the opposite: the gimmick robbed the film of any sense of potency or reality for me. When characters are forced to travel long distances, you need broken shots to impart a sense of time passing without it happening in real time. As it stands, the main character makes a journey that's supposedly 8 or so hours over the course of less than two real-time hours. The effect of this, between the constantly shifting scenery and the need for stuff to happen in lieu of things like plot or character development (there's a lot of talking in this film, but I left it feeling like these people were still pure strangers to me), is that the film feels like... a live-action Naughty Dog game, maybe? Or a WW1-themed amusement park ride? The film hurriedly shuffles the main character (and the viewer along with him) from set-piece to set-piece. Stuff happens, things blow up, people die, but it all felt supremely staged and artificial to me.

Don't get me wrong: as a technical achievement, it's fairly impressive. The sets, makeup, and whatnot as impressive, and the film is filled with striking imagery. But it all seems a bit hollow by the end. It attempts to top the horrifying, immanent experience of war that was so successfully communciated by Christopher Nolan's excellent Dunkirk, but the impression I had, by the end, was that the director had no understanding of how to get inside the viewer's mind.

I recently rewatched Starship Troopers, for the first time on Blu-Ray. A fun satire of militant nationalism with a sci-fi flair, I enjoy myself every time I watch it (despite the fact that the special effects are dated in spots, I love the first scene in space where Carmen flies the little shuttle around the space station).

Also ordered my next batch of Blu-Rays:

• Evangelion 1.11 (first film in a series that retells the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion).
• the Living Daylights (my next Bond film. I actually forgot to check to see if this or License to Kill was next after A View to a Kill, but I figured in the end it really doesn't matter which I watch first).
• Star Wars Episode 1: the Phantom Menace (figured I'd start collecting the series).
• Stripes (This Bill Murray comedy is definitely a guilty pleasure).