Topic: Movie thread.

I just got back from seeing Spirited Away: Live.

watching Downhill Willie on Tubi right now. an odd funny ski movie that has Keeith Coogan in it along with that Staci Keanan along with Locklyn Munroe when he was younger

@JaxonH I dunno, I still find the cinema itself is better than watching it at home with a fancy telly. Ignoring that the screen and sound will always be bigger and better there’s a level of immersion with the cinema and just being in a room filled with the energy from other people is movie magic. Like think about horror films or rom coms when the room if filled with laughter and screams.

It’s just a shame it’s becoming the norm for folk will only go to it now for big budget franchises or kids cartoons. I’ve seen small budget films like Raw, Whiplash or Rye Lane look stunning on the big movie screen and mid budget films like Dredd, The Fall or Evil Dead Rise put some of those $200m+ movies to shame with how good they look. I know someone who works as a prop maker and they will show me things they have made for the likes of Marvel which look incredibly cool but then you can barely see it in the movie itself as it’s too jammed with rubbish on the screen which is just wasteful movie making.

A few movies this past weekend.

the Wandering Earth (Netflix)

China's attempt to output a Hollywood quality big budget sci-fi blockbuster. When it's discovered that the sun is unstable, Humanity decides to put aside their differences and form the UEG (United Earth Government) and in a massive undertaking constructs 10,000 massive engines across the globe in order to pilot the planet to a new solar system...

The premise is laughibly dumb (the core of the story is set 17 years into the 2,500 year long journey, where humanity must leave the safety of their underground strongholds in order to repair the engines on the surface after many are damaged by Jupiter's gravity, before the planet is too far gone to resist the gaseous giant's pull) & I can't remember anyone's names, but I actually had (a lot) of fun with this.

While the effects can feel a bit too "video gamey" at times, the production is overall a lot more modern and up to snuff than I'd have imagined, with often absolutely stunning scale & really cool looking tech design. In terms of vibe it kinda reminded me of 90's blockbusters like Independence Day, Armageddon, or Twister (just, orders of magnitude bigger) which I liked. Really fun popcorn flick kinda stuff.

Memories (Blu-Ray)

Anime anthology film consisting of 3 sci-fi shorts.

"Magnetic Rose" - A group of deep space scrappers runs across the wreckage of a giant ship sending out a distress signal. Mystery & danger abound when they explore it and become involved in a sci-fi twist on the haunted castle trope. This is the deepest when it comes to narrative & emotion, with some affectingly powerful scenes.

"Stink Bomb" - A sick office worker for a pharmaceutical company unwittingly becomes a walking bio-weapon after taking some experimental pills, and he stumbles his way towards Tokyo while avoiding an all out military assault aimed at taking the befuddled guy out. This one was really super fun & even humorous in a bit of a dark way.

"Cannon Fodder" - A day in the life of a family who lives in a society who's entire existence exists to wage war (from the schooling, to industry, and even the architecture of the city itself) just for the sake of waging war. This is the most artful of the bunch, with a unique aesthetic imbued with the vibe of fascist & communist propaganda imagery, with something to say about the pointlessness & futility of war.

Overall it was a pretty interesting watch & one I'd recommend.

Beast (Amazon Prime)

While on an African safari a father and his two estranged teen daughters find themselves being hunted by a lion with bloodlust on it's mind after his pride is killed by poachers.

While most modern films of this Ilk try to go too big and bombastic (the Meg, the modern Jurassic films), the smaller, more personal vibe of this one really works in it's favor. Of course there's still some Hollywood magic at play (both Idris' character & the lion survive things that should have realistically killed them a time or two), but overall it's pleasingly tense.

@JaxonH, I've never actually seen True Lies, but may look into it when the 4K disc drops myself. Glad to hear it sounds good.

@jump
I love theaters, I've just grown incredibly anti-social over the years and hate going anywhere besides work. Not to mention the cost. If I had the choice of a personal theater, I'd take it any day. But as it stands, I much prefer watching at home.

These are always fun to kick off a discussion, how many of the 100 "greatest" movies you have seen? From Empire so pinch of salt.

I got 99, I've yet to see The Exorcist not that I've got anything against it but it's just not come up yet. Luckily I saw Mulholland Drive not too long ago otherwise it would be 98.

Some of the choices were very odd like Drive as bestest everest? Captain America Civil War over The Winter Soldier or at all and The Departed over Internal Affairs. I personally question if you need every entry of Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars too.

The omissions are long. Apart from a few like Amelie and Old Boy there's a big lack of world cinema, no The Sound Of Music or The Wizard Of Oz is a surprise. There's a few recent big hitters like Parasite, Get Out, Knives Out, Everything Everywhere All At Once missing but I'm guessing they want to give them a chance to prove they are timeless first.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/phoenixgray/how-many-of-empires-100-...

@jump I've seen 13*, which to be honest is more than I would have expected given how bad I am at watching films. I didn't count ones that I've seen part of but got bored and switched off halfway through (Citizen Kane, Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark - in my defence, the latter two were when I was a kid and I'll probably give them another chance at some point).

*based on the Buzzfeed checklist. If you click the link to the actual Empire article it looks like they've updated it since then, there are a lot of differences.

@Dogorilla I think ranking it has made the Empire list worse. The higher rankings films are lot of franchises but they are the ones that feel like segments as they are only part of the story rather than a film in its own right. It's the thing that bugged me about Dune, great movie which everyone likes but my reaction was the ending which feels like an ad break which never came back.

I'm feeling cocky so if I were to take a guess the 13 you have seen they were the Star Wars and Marvel films, the animated films The Lion King, Toy Story and Spirited Away, you're a Brit so Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz which almost mandatory for us with the last two I'm less confident about being right but Ghostbusters and Back To The Future?

@Rambler I just saw the quiz pop up in my Twitter but I don't remember Empire being this meh when I use to browse it in WH Smith for free. Maybe I got it confused with Total Film as the one that balances art farty with fun blockbusters films.

@jump I'm afraid I haven't seen Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz but you got everything else right! The other two were The Matrix and E.T.

And yeah, rankings are a little bit meaningless when those serialised franchises are included. Avengers Infinity War and Endgame are high up on the updated list, and they are indeed very satisfying if you've seen the other 20-ish MCU films up to that point but borderline incomprehensible if you haven't.

@Rambler It missed some easily agreeable contemporary foreign films like The Mood For Love, The Intouchables and City Of God too. I wouldn’t put them on my greatest 100 bestest everest films but I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at seeing them on a list either.

Even if it's a bad list it does make a nice change from having either The Godfather or Citizen Kane taking up the two top spots even if instead it's one of the Lordy Rings Of Metalz films and 5th Star Wars film.

@Dogorilla Shoot, I thought I had it with Shaun and Fuzz.

Personally I don’t think Endgame works, the middle is meant to be a celebratory greatest hits of seeing the past films yet it feels like a slog which is made up for by people clapping every few seconds at the call backs and cameos at the end whilst Infinity War which is the obvious two parter/incomplete film is actually a more complete film if you view it as Thanos, the character with the most screen time is the protagonist and he wins.

@jump I was worried Endgame would be a slog at 3 hours long but personally I really enjoyed it, I found the time flew by and I thought the way it brought together plot points from the whole saga was clever. But I'll admit I'm the kind of person this tweet is about, so I can't really explain what I liked about it!

IMDb's top 250 movies list (by user ratings) is quite interesting. The very top is fairly similar to the Empire list, but overall it has a decent variety of time periods, nationalities and genres.

@Dogorilla I'm not a fan of IMDB myself, a quick look does make it seem a bit better than the Empire list though.

IMDB feels too much like unless it's been grandfarther in everything else has been review bombed/padded making it all meaningless now as well as missing deep cuts. As it leans to populist by being fan voted you will get people who see smaller but very clever/cool films like say Primer, Raw or It Follows which they don't get "it" so they give it a 1 which is a shame as these are often the type of films you will still be thinking about for weeks later and inspire people to make films themselves.

@jump That's true, IMDb is very susceptible to review bombing, or just people who give everything either a 10 or a 1 with nothing in between. In particular, anything that's deemed 'woke' will probably get lots of 1/10 reviews from miserable gits.

@Dogorilla I do like reading the anti-woke reviews as they are so bad at banter and trolling, like how they use Mary Sue over and over again about superhero films rather than something clever, it's funny or you could have a drinking game with it. The Mario ones were funny where before it got celebrated for being anti-woke they were complaining it was woke for racing on a rainbow bridge but like people who complain why is Rage Against The Machine or Star Trek suddenly woke they get torn and mocked relentlessly for it.

I don't get why you need to agree with a film in the first place. It sounds like Hollywood formula rubbish where there must be a happy end, a romantic subplot where they kiss at the end and all that sort of check listing which happens with the most blandest of films.

I didn't see any complaints about Rainbow Road except one nobody on Twitter. Like, if you single out ignorant Twitter comments you can portray any type of ignorant complaint against anything. But it's not really representative of reality.

The whole woke vs anti woke is a made up war spouted by people who don't know what they're talking about. The majority of ppl were not claiming the film was woke. One person, just one, said they had concerns Peach could be a girl boss based on trailers, and immediately said they were relieved that was not the case after seeing it.

Likewise, only one person- just one, claimed it was antiwoke afterward, to push an agenda. And I saw one article- just one, boasting about the Mario movie supposedly being woke (apparently to attempt to ruffle feathers, who knows).

This is the world we live in. One person says something and suddenly that position gets ascribed to millions of people. Before you know it you've got this whole woke vs anti woke when the entire thing never even existed to begin with, unless you count the ramblings of a single individual who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Mario succeeded because it was neither woke nor anti-woke. It was just a normal movie.

I absolutely detest propaganda from ideologues in films- when there's genuine agendas being pushed. Mario was never that. And no one of consequence ever believed it was pro or anti. Just people who live in a bubble who can't help but use anything and everything they see as leverage to attack "the other side".

@JaxonH I saw quite a few folk complaining about the rainbow and celebrating it for being not woke, as is often the case one idiot sees something so other idiots repeat what has been said. It's why terminology is often identical and how behaviour is so predictable thanks to zeitgeist hopping.

Such things aren't limited to wokey or non-wokey debates, you will see some users on here just re-post Youtube vids going this is my opinion on things and you can't get them off that thinking not matter how well the counter argument is.

What is important though is to relentlessly mock stupidity for your own amusement as what is life without laughter? ;p

@jump
Can't argue there. Lot of people are parrots and sheep and repeat what they're told. I've seen this first hand with just about every possible opinion you could imagine. On all sides, from every angle. Seems to be human nature.

Rings of Power is straight reference grade streaming.

Fell off after the 3rd episode but now that I got my TV dialed in with Dolby Vision and realized dynamic range compression on my soundbar was cutting off the 4 height speakers in Dolby Atmos, I decided to try it out. A+++

I dare say it looks/sounds nearly as good as a 4k blu-ray. It really is exceptional quality streaming.

@JaxonH have you seen The Sting?