Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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BrawlMan

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There are those who watch films expecting perfection in every aspect, and those who watch films expecting to be entertained for a couple of hours; I'm of the latter camp. Upgrade entertained me, so it was "good."
I just don't get that mindset. To expect perfection in every single field or category. These critics have them impossibly high standards. And what's worse is that many of them needs to double down and be "angry" when things don't go their way, or the dissonance is different. Or if a filmmaker specifically made a movie to be entertaining and nothing else. I like something challenging every now and then, but I'm not going to expect the same thing from every single writer or film director. Honestly, film criticism has gotten worse in some regard. Especially from the online community. The ones that go out of their way to insult people for liking or disliking to film is what bugs me the most, and why I don't bother with the majority of them.
 
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Xprimentyl

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I just don't get that mindset. To expect perfection in every single field or category. These critics have them possibly in high standards. And what's worse is that someone needs a double down and be "angry" when things don't go their way, or the dissonance is different. Or if a filmmaker specifically made a movie to be entertaining and nothing else. I like something challenging every now and then, but I'm not going to expect the same thing from every single Rider or film director. Honestly, film criticism has gotten worse in some regard. Especially from the online community. The ones that go out of their way to insult people for liking or disliking to film is what bugs me the most, and why I don't bother with the majority of them.
It's the state of the modern world, becoming ever more cynical, and as long as *I* think it should be *better*, it sucks; if *I* find any imperfection, it *failed*.

I don't listen to professional critics, never have (people in forums? I know this disaffected lot, so their opinions don't really sway me though I often enjoy reading them.) I've found that their job, by virtue of their very existence, is to point out flaws, and as entertainment is highly subjective, their "flaws" and mine need not be the same. They may be in the end, but I'd rather go in with a blank slate of opinion and come out saying "I feel this way" as opposed to "that guy was right."

I like to use this example: say you and I are in a room, and I tell you a woman is about to walk in, and she has the biggest nose, I mean, a HUGE fucking honker; if she looks up you can see straight through to her brain; she blows her nose with a beach towel. I continue on and on like this until she finally walks in; what's the first thing you're going to look at? She could be the most beautiful woman in the world, but your eyes are going straight to her nose to see the flaw for yourself. Never mind if you don't personally think it's *that* big, it'll be under undue scrutiny because I led you down that path with my opinion.
 
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BrawlMan

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It's the state of the modern world, becoming ever more cynical, and as long as *I* think it should be *better*, it sucks; if *I* find any imperfection, it *failed*.

I don't listen to professional critics, never have (people in forums? I know this disaffected lot, so their opinions don't really sway me though I often enjoy reading them.) I've found that their job, by virtue of their very existence, is to point out flaws, and as entertainment is highly subjective, their "flaws" and mine need not be the same. They may be in the end, but I'd rather go in with a blank slate of opinion and come out saying "I feel this way" as opposed to "that guy was right."
Now that I think about it, the audience suffers from this too. Not to the extent of film critics, but it is there. I remember the YoVideoGames crew talking about this back in 2019. About how even if a film is just good, below good, or decent, people feel the need to jump and hate on the film like it's the worst movie ever. These people have clearly never watched a bad movie if they think something that is slightly below good or decent. Let's not even get started on video games where this situation is actually worse.
 

McElroy

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-I really like the STEM part of the film. Not just because I'm kind of a sucker for that stuff (even if I don't have a technical bone in my body), but that all of the devices of the main characters feel like they have at least one foot in reality. As in, lasers using magnetic containment, or Honey Lemon's satchel using the periodic table...yeah, it's far-fetched, but arguably more down to Earth than, say, Tony Stark whipping out elements for plot convenience. The geek/STEM stuff is part of why I feel this film could have been even better as a drama piece.
Any enjoyment I could've had from the movie went out of the window with the bonkers sci-fi elements. Their inventions are all much, MUCH too dangerous to do anything else than get them killed. The comparison to the dumb stuff in Iron Man 2 is pretty good, but I think all of it with the exception of the idea of a robot like Baymax is on par when it comes to ultra-soft sci-fi. Their stuff wouldn't be out of place in Godzilla vs Kong.
 

Gordon_4

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It's the state of the modern world, becoming ever more cynical, and as long as *I* think it should be *better*, it sucks; if *I* find any imperfection, it *failed*.

I don't listen to professional critics, never have (people in forums? I know this disaffected lot, so their opinions don't really sway me though I often enjoy reading them.) I've found that their job, by virtue of their very existence, is to point out flaws, and as entertainment is highly subjective, their "flaws" and mine need not be the same. They may be in the end, but I'd rather go in with a blank slate of opinion and come out saying "I feel this way" as opposed to "that guy was right."

I like to use this example: say you and I are in a room, and I tell you a woman is about to walk in, and she has the biggest nose, I mean, a HUGE fucking honker; if she looks up you can see straight through to her brain; she blows her nose with a beach towel. I continue on and on like this until she finally walks in; what's the first thing you're going to look at? She could be the most beautiful woman in the world, but your eyes are going straight to her nose to see the flaw for yourself. Never mind if you don't personally think it's *that* big, it'll be under undue scrutiny because I led you down that path with my opinion.
Or, and stay with me here, I see this gorgeous woman and find no flaws and look at you like you still pick gnats off your mate’s back because you’ve made a stupid statement.

People can whine and ***** about critics all they fucking want, but if you fall to the sway of their argument then it either means the argument was a good one or you’re so weak willed you can’t just shrug your shoulders and say “Whatever man“ and enjoy it anyway.
 

Thaluikhain

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Or, and stay with me here, I see this gorgeous woman and find no flaws and look at you like you still pick gnats off your mate’s back because you’ve made a stupid statement.

People can whine and ***** about critics all they fucking want, but if you fall to the sway of their argument then it either means the argument was a good one or you’re so weak willed you can’t just shrug your shoulders and say “Whatever man“ and enjoy it anyway.
Well, yes, but that doesn't seem a million miles away from claiming propaganda (etc) only works on the foolish, which we know not to be as true as it should be.
 

Gordon_4

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Well, yes, but that doesn't seem a million miles away from claiming propaganda (etc) only works on the foolish, which we know not to be as true as it should be.
Look at the rate paranoid thought goes, Sesame Street will be propaganda according to some cheesbrain before I'm forty and its getting to the point where I'm not sure how many fucks I've got to give about shitheads screaming about the agenda that may or may not be present in the next thing I decide to consume to stop myself from going totally fucking insane.

Propaganda works on everyone, if it only worked on the stupid no one would bother. I just don't think it was subliminal messaging about the evils of <insert cause here> that meant I thought Warcraft was a kick ass movie but way more people didn't.
 

Thaluikhain

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Look at the rate paranoid thought goes, Sesame Street will be propaganda according to some cheesbrain before I'm forty and its getting to the point where I'm not sure how many fucks I've got to give about shitheads screaming about the agenda that may or may not be present in the next thing I decide to consume to stop myself from going totally fucking insane.
Eh, it is propaganda, it's just that Sesame Street's agenda currently has widespread acceptance. There's a bunch of people (and puppets) of all colours living together in peace and harmony, for example. They are totally pushing that line, we just don't see it as that unusual at the moment.

Propaganda works on everyone, if it only worked on the stupid no one would bother. I just don't think it was subliminal messaging about the evils of <insert cause here> that meant I thought Warcraft was a kick ass movie but way more people didn't.
Wouldn't be too surprised if lots of professional critics (and their propaganda) made a movie unpopular. Not that one in particular, perhaps, but that it had happened to some movie/s.

(I didn't think Warcraft was a great film, but fine for that kind of thing. Shame they probably won't make any sequels)
 

gorfias

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Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix.


I thought this might be something of a slog as I've already seen at least one detailed documentary on it.

I have to wonder when it was written and filmed as, hate to mix movie love and politics, but this is about a political prosecution of some people that basically did a January 6. Netflix is biased in the Left's favor. Very odd timing for this to come out. Oh well. Everything old is new again.

As for the movie? I was very pleasantly surprised. Great performances by a number of faces with which you will be familiar. The movie is challenging but also fun and funny in ways I did not anticipate. It deserved its Academy Award nomination for best picture as well as about a 9/10 rating from Rotten Tomatoes. I hope you all get to watch it.

 

SilentPony

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Just watched Army of the Dead, and wow. This is bad. This is Harley Quinn and Suicide Squad bad.

There's a quote from Zero Punctuation where Yahtzee tells game writers that maybe they should write a second draft, and that sums up this movie. This is a first draft movie with huge, glaring plot holes and empty storylines. Not like "Oh how did this character get from here to there" plot holes, but Suicide Squad ones where they just say lines, and then never follow up on it. Like the daughter character goes on the mission with the mercenaries because she's looking for a lost friend in the zombie apocalypse. And they never show the character. Its a major plot point that simply never comes to a conclusion, good or bad.
One of the merc's whole thing is he loves cutting up bodies with a giant saw, never does it in the movie.
They show that in the hot Vegas sun zombies cook and dry up into little zombie crisps, and then later explain how zombies are attracted to warm flesh, yet never eat the literal cooking bodies outside. They have robot zombies for some reason. Some zombies are ninjas, some are sleeping, some can sorta talk and think, others are like classic shuffling BRAINS zombies. Vegas is restricted air space so they have to sneak in, but then they just fly out later on a helicopter, no problem. Scenes come and go with new, random characters introduced only to never show up again. Major plot points and story elements are either forgotten or just casually explained away.
Its an absolute mess of a movie that even its blood and gore can't save.

2/10, seriously Bautista if you're thinking of quitting the MCU reconsider. And fire your agent for letting you be in this movie. And Zack Snyder you need to go away for a few years.
 
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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Nomadland (2020)

Won Oscars. In my view deserved them.

This seems to be a quasi-docudrama. Or perhaps a fictionalisation of real people, "based on a true story", about people who live itinerant lifestyles in vans, doing basic, jobs. It's really a character study, I guess, based around Frances McDormand's character (Fearne, not necessarily spelled that way), and the people she meets. It's got lots of lovely shots of bits of America. And gives some idea what it is to do a life of baseline, minimum wage jobs. But mostly it's about the people - all in some way slightly broken, or out-of-place, in regular America. It's in a way a very melancholy movie, these people struggling through their lives, yet also at the same time very uplifting, in the way they have created for themselves their own community to give each other strength and to find a way fowards.

I'm pretty sure it's got quite a lot of amateur actors in. Well, I suggest they are probably some of these nomads in real life, playing either themselves or some approximate version of themselves. They come out of it quite well. Sometimes acting is hyper-real, the actor feels the need to clearly emote and direct the watcher. These people just tell their stories, matter-of-factly, like a real person probably would. The plainness of this both stands out from what you expect from a movie, and yet also seems natural rather than wooden.

It's a lovely bit of film-making, anyway.
 

Agema

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Just watched Army of the Dead, and wow. This is bad. This is Harley Quinn and Suicide Squad bad.
I've seen the trailers, and I don't like the idea of smart zombies. 28 Days Later zombies that are fast and feral, fine. The sort of Romero zombies that have some vague echoes of a human mind and sensibilities, fine. But if zombies are properly, meaningfully smart, there's not really any point to them being zombies: the concept of a zombie is broken beyond repair.

I'm going to watch it anyway, of course.
 

BrawlMan

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I've seen the trailers, and I don't like the idea of smart zombies. 28 Days Later zombies that are fast and feral, fine. The sort of Romero zombies that have some vague echoes of a human mind and sensibilities, fine. But if zombies are properly, meaningfully smart, there's not really any point to them being zombies: the concept of a zombie is broken beyond repair.
There is no set in stone rules for zombies. I always hated that criticism like it's some ultimate truth or fact. It's bullshit. There is a trope called Our Zombies Are Different for a reason. The idea of smart zombies is nothing new. Have you forgotten about the zombies in Return of the Living Dead I & II? They could talk, think, coordinate attacks, plan, and were almost impossible to kill. House of the Dead has zombies that are smart to use weapons, crawl/ninja run on walls, swim, and fly (HotD 4) for Christ sake! Not everything has to be the fucking same. It's why I grew bored with the zombie genre and over saturation. Most of it all became the same mediocre or below that shit fest! I'm not defending nor against the film, because I've yet to see it, but I'll gladly take something that tries something unique and different over the same crap over and over again.
 
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SilentPony

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Oh and Zombie babies, I forgot that part. Not like human babies bitten and turned into zombies, no zombies getting it on and conceiving a little zombie baby. Like they're dead, rotting, walking bags of shit and flesh, but the plumbing works, zombie sperm and zombie eggs are still being produced and zombies get horny.
 

BrawlMan

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Oh and Zombie babies, I forgot that part. Not like human babies bitten and turned into zombies,
More or less happened that way in Zombi 3 and Dawn of the Dead (2004).

Like they're dead, rotting, walking bags of shit and flesh, but the plumbing works, zombie sperm and zombie eggs are still being produced and zombies get horny.
Huh...funny. Did not expect something so crazy.
 

Agema

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There is no set in stone rules for zombies.
Okay, so then my zombie is a 10 foot tall thing with an exoskeleton, unusually elongated head and huge teeth, drips goo and has acid blood, creeps around spaceships and space colonies devouring the crew, and reproduces not by biting and infecting victims, but by laying an egg out of which a parasite emerges that lays a larva in the host.

And don't you dare tell me it's an alien or xenomorph. It's a zombie.
 

BrawlMan

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Okay, so then my zombie is a 10 foot tall thing with an exoskeleton, unusually elongated head and huge teeth, drips goo and has acid blood, creeps around spaceships and space colonies devouring the crew, and reproduces not by biting and infecting victims, but by laying an egg out of which a parasite emerges that lays a larva in the host.

And don't you dare tell me it's an alien or xenomorph. It's a zombie.
Now you're just being plain silly, grasping for straws. Not in my town. You know something wrong when Capcom has a better grasp of knocking off Aliens with the G babies (who are offshoot mutants of William Birkin) in their 2nd zombie game in the franchise. Hell, the parasitic zombies they already got down with in RE4 and RE5.
 

PsychedelicDiamond

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Army of the Dead

Zack Snyder directing a Netflix original, which turns out to be a fairly straight forward Zombie movie. It definitely is a departure from the pop-mythological epics that were his last few superhero movies, less elegant and bombastic, more self aware and gritty. Also shorter, though, mind you, "shorter" for Zack Snyder means still well over 2 hours. It definitely shows Snyder at his most Paul Verhoeven, though the movie never quite commits to the bit quite as much as Starship Troopers or even a younger Snyder's 300 did.

It's a simple enough premise. A zombie virus broke out after a a military transport in Nevada got into an accident. The outbreak seems to be mostly localized in Las Vegas, which has been quarantined and is planned to be nuked on Independence Day. A shady businessman employs an ensemble cast of action heroes to secure a safe from there, days before it would be razed to the ground. What starts of a a fairly straight forward heist movie with a zombie gimmick... well, basically stays that way until the end, but it's still a Snyder movie so there's a generous helping of subtext there, most of it not very subtle. It feels very much in the vain of cheesy satirical action movies from the 80s, think Robocop or Escape from New York. It is implied that the quarantine zone outside of Vegas is used to detain civil rights activists and progressives, in a way that blatantly invokes the demonization of anti fascists and Anti-Police-Violence protestes under the Trump administration. Human rights violations in the quarantine zone parallels the treatment of refugees from South America and the Middle East and, what is probably its most central plotpoint, the a subgroup of the Zombies aren't mindless monsters, they've set up something like their own civilization in the ruins of Las Vegas. Snyder's movies are always a product of his personal morals and even Army of the Dead, which, by all means, feels like a light hearted palette cleanser between more major projects, has them front and center. Which is good, because they're definitely the most appreciable thing about it. It's a comparatively lower budget affair than something like Justice League or Watchmen so while it does have its share of well realized action sequences and well staged shots, it's mostly missing the visual grandeur of Snyder's bigger movies. The ensemble cast does a fine job bringing personality to what are, in essence, stock heist movie archetypes. Especially David Bautista's "Gentle Giant" energy goes a long way in making the viewer root for him. There's some good gore. I liked the part where they fed the sexist border control guy to Zombies. That was fun.

In the end it's a fun, campy action movie that will most likely end up a footnote in Snyder's career. It's held up by an earnest feeling punk rock attitude from one of the few remaining mainstream action directors who's not afraid to address what's wrong with society. After his Magnum Opus Justice League it does feel a bit underwhelming, and I do hope he will turn towards more amibtious projects now that it's done, but I had an alright time with it.
 
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XsjadoBlayde

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Oxygen (Netflix)
Woman awakes trapped in sci-fi box, can't remember anything, must work with AI and sci-fi screens to figure shit out. Best watched subbed not dubbed, as is French. Pretty good overall. Have fun cycling through the potential twists you've seen in other sci-fi entertainment as it progresses to see which of those it will land on. Ending was a bit meh, but the journey there ain't bad.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Now you're just being plain silly, grasping for straws.
No, it's illustrating the point that there are limits to what a zombie should reasonably be.

(Aliens is, arguably, very much like a classic zombie movie: a small besieged force assaulted by implacable hordes of killers that either kill them outright or "turn" them.)

The problem with a smart zombie is that it loses a lot of characteristic that usefully make zombies distinct and characteristic. Smart zombies may as well be vampires, brainwashed cannibal cultists, people on a rage drug, or some weird genetic / Frankenstein experiment gone wrong.