Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Piscian

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Sounds like I already missed the Army of the Dead debate, but in short it is a HOT MESS and frankly I hated it.

I hated it so much I almost wanted to dedicate a seperate thread for the 7556 things wrong with it, from piss poor characters, atrocious acting, a plot that is both aimless and nonsensical, painful cinematography, to it being just plain boring. Its even hard to tell where the characters are often because they reused the same location over and over for multiple places. I just found out from RLM he straight up copied scenes from Aliens, Star Wars, and American werewolf in London beat for beat. Even the dialog is copy pasta.

 
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Xprimentyl

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The Father : Good / Great

A touching film about an elderly person (Anthony Hopkins) dealing with dementia. Interesting film as it's told from the perspective of said elderly person; you get a unique perspective on his take on the world that's eluding him. If you've got grandparents still with you, go hug hem. NOW.
 
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McElroy

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Army of the Dead
Definitely a movie that was made. Turn your brain off for this one. It's like a bunch of scenes edited together with the heist plot as shoddy glue. Snyder directed the camerawork too, so that too is excessive, but it does make the movie look "bigger". Zombieland's opening holds up to this day even in Zach Snyder's mind. Playing Zombie by the Cranberries is tasteless as fuck here, and I really don't know why they did it. To top off all the other tacky stuff in there? It sure accomplishes that. 5/10
 

happyninja42

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Playing Zombie by the Cranberries is tasteless as fuck here, and I really don't know why they did it.
That's a pretty easy answer. It had the word zombie in the title, and is popular.....that's it. I doubt it went any deeper than that. I suspect the scene included lots of brain shots on the zombies? You know, what's in your head? *headshot with lots of brain and blood splatter*
 
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Dalisclock

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The Death of Stalin(Netflix)

So this is a movie I hadn't heard of until fairly recently until I heard Nick Hodges of History Buffs talk about it on his channel but it intrigued me enough to check it out. Basically, it's a compressed adaptation of the events surrounding the death of the infamous Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin and the race amongst the upper Soviet Leaders to fill the power Vacuum he left when he died. But it's also a comedy, a very DARK comedy. And surprisingly, it works.

Don't get me wrong, the while the movie doesn't go deep into the atrocities the Soviet State committed against it's own people during the Stalin Era, it doesn't gloss over them either. The constant fear people have of pissing off Stalin or his NKVD enforcer Lavrentiy Beria(who basically ran the Soviet Secret police, purges and torture apparatus) is on full display, and people are constantly shown being arrested or executed seemingly on a whim because they ended up on a list or just pissed off the wrong person. There's a creepy sort of Dissonance that they casually talk about people who have been unpersoned or the purges like they're ordering lunch, and while there's talk of reform and scaling back the executions and purges, there's seemingly little regret for the ones they already engaged in.

Nikita Khrushchev (played by Steve Buscemi) comes across as a the "Good guy" here, or maybe VIllain protagonist is far more apt, because he comes across as merely an asshole whereas Stalin was a Genocidal Paranoid nutcase and Bernia was a Torturer, Murderer and Rapist(including children) in addition to his duties of running the execution squads and purges, so it's not hard for Khrushchev to come across as the lesser of evils here. The film also makes it clear everyone(including Khrushchev) was complicit in the Soviet Atrocities and you didn't survive that long in Stalins Inner Circle without being neck deep in his shit, which gets brought up when the rest of the Soviet leadership eventually turn on Bernia and have him arrested, giving him a 5 min "trial" and taking him out into the yard to be shot.

Where the comedy comes in is the fact that the Upper Party Leadership, Notably Khrushchev and Beria are shown as begrudgingly tolerating each other at the best of times and the film plays it like a really dark version of The Office where one wrong move can get you executed. It's hard to really describe but there's a lot of graveyard humor here and a lot of mileage is gotten from the Inner circle constantly bickering with each other it's wonder they managed to run a country when it seems like they could barely keep themselves from strangling each other half the time.

Performances are fun to watch, notably Buscemi(who doesn't even attempt to not sound like himself, but then again neither does anyone else) but also Jason Isaacs as Field Marshal Zhukov, who steals every scene he's in by taking no one's shit. In one scene, when being recruited to help take down Bernia in a coup, he boasts "I fucked Germany. I think I can handle a flesh lump in a waistcoat" and it feels that like nicely encapsulates his character in the film.

There's a number of historical inaccuracies(including compressing the events of what was half a year into about a week for the sake of drama) but it more or less gets a pass because it works. Definitely worth taking a look at if you can stomach the subject matter.
 
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Samtemdo8

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My standard for Zombie media is Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, and Nazi Zombies. Basically video games.

Never really cared for Zombie Films and TV for some reason.

Though my fav is Shaun of the Dead
 
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Dalisclock

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My favorite scene(s) from that movie are the parade of people discovering that Stalin is dead or dying and changing their attitude towards it based on who's in the room with them. It is like a long series of sketches on the same topic and the repeating jokes (all the good doctors are gone because Stalin purged them and you can't let a bad doctor treat him, can you?) just drives it into absolute hilarity.
That and the whole sequence of "Stalin has a stroke and literally nobody wants to do anything because if he's not actually dead he'll be mad and have someone(probably them) executed when he wakes up" so everyone more or less just finds excuses to dither and do nothing until he actually does die.
Guard 1: (hears a thump on the floor of Stalins Bedroom as he has his stroke) "Should we investigate that?"
Guard 2: "Do you want to get shot?"
Guards stay at their post and do not investigate, leaving the tea lady the next morning to find Stalin lying there.

Granted, a lot of that might have been intentional.
 
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BrawlMan

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Drive (1997) - The one with Mark Dacasacos. The guy who played Jimmy Lee in Double Dragon (1994). It's a Hong Kong style action film made in America and it is tight! How come I never saw this back in the 90s? I don't recall it ever showing up on Cinemax, Showtime, or HBO. I do know this was a straight-to-VHS movie. I did not know this film existed until I was almost out of high school.

The plot is basically Toby (Mark D.) has an artificial heart that makes him super strong, and is trying to get it removed. Going cross country across the states to LA. He meets up with Malik Brody (Kadeem Hardison), a guy jobless and near divorce, recruits him to help him out (unwillingly at first). The action scenes are freaking awesome. How Mark never got more work than he should have did is beyond me. The stunt choreography are beautiful and carry that finesse you'd see in HK and Japanese cinema. In fact, a Japanese team did a lot of the fight coordination and it shows. Crazy, stylish, and over-the-top.

The director is Steven Wang. He directed the live-action Guyver movies and it shows. He uses some of the same crew from Guyver 2: Dark Hero. A movie I do recommend, if you're in to Henshin style heroes with gore. This dude did a lot of straight to video action movies. The version of Drive I watched is the Director's cut with everything restored. The movie ends open-ended on a sequel hook, but that obviously never went anywhere. Watch this movie.

EDIT: This is the scene RE5 got its inspiration from. I recommend you don't watch the rest after that, if you don't want to be spoiled.


 
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BrawlMan

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Saw Double Impact again. I got the MVD edition. This blu ray has the best bonus features. You gets tons of deleted scenes and a making of documentary that is in two parts. This is a must have for old school action fans or Van Damme fans. The best Double Dragon movie ever made.
 
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Bartholen

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Army of the Dead on Netflix. 3/10.

Granted, I watched it more as a background movie while drinking and talking with my friends so maybe I missed something brilliant. But the fact that the annoyances bubbled up even in that context should be a dire enough mark against the movie.

It's about as Zack Snyder as you get: shallow, style over substance, indulgent, massively overlong, takes itself way too seriously for the premise, only slightly pretentious this time, and all the music choices are cringe-inducingly on the nose and unoriginal. And because I thought of another analogy I don't want to go to waste, the movie is like a classic zombie in itself: mindless, aimless, slow, not a hint of depth or thought in it, and barely capable of doing even the most basic functions. And to go for a third analogy because fuck you: It's a movie version of an overlong Call of Duty Zombies map where all the players have aimbot enabled. The two decent things about it are the zombie makeup, and the fact that the actors do a decent job with what they're given. That I would say for all Zack Snyder movies save for Sucker Punch, which is in a category of suck(er punch) all of its own.

More perhaps than ever before I wondered how self-aware a filmmaker Zack Snyder is with this movie. I definitely laughed more at the movie than with the movie. The premise and (massively overlong) opening montage hint at a jolly good tongue in cheek 90-minute splatterfest. But the movie itself is very drab, dour, slow, grim and serious. You can seriously skip like the first 50 minutes, because that's how long it takes for the movie to even get to Las Vegas. Everything prior to that is introducing all these stock characters you don't care about and going over meaningless technical detail. And even once they get to Las Vegas it's a lot of slow walking around, maneuvering around zombies and people speaking at each other angrily. For a 2,5 hour zombie movie this movie is also shockingly lacking in satisfying gore. Despite its R rating most of the violence takes place in dark rooms and hallways where most details are conveniently obscured, and whatever few moments of genuine splatter there are are cut very quickly away from. There's hardly any tension, it's never scary, the music is confusingly unfitting when it's not painfully on the nose and there's plenty of very dumb visuals that aren't even the fun kind of dumb, they just feel embarrassing. For some reason there's also an element of zombie romance (yes, you read that right) present, which is just another part where I wondered how seriously Snyder wanted me to take the whole thing.

There's a halfway decent 85-minute zombie flick here buried underneath all the bloat, but even then it would have all the Snyderisms that plague his every movie. It seriously feels like Snyder thought "zombies in the Vegas strip would look cool" and nothing beyond that. And made that thought into a 2,5 hour movie instead of a 5-minute music video. Dawn of the Dead '04 this is not. Skip it.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

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Run

Sarah Paulson plays a psycho ***** who obsessively keeps her homeschooled daughter away from the outside world. There's a couple of neat twists along the way that plunge you further and further into just how fucked up the situation is. Solid little thriller, don't have much to say about it. It's like Misery by way of that one scene in The Sixth Sense.
 

McElroy

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Independence Day: Resurgence
Nature found a way for Roland Emmerich to direct a sequel to his 1996 alien blockbuster. It has elements of the first one which all feel dated as hell now. Everything looks fake, and the characters are fake, spitting awful lines and situation-inappropriate screaming. Young actors are nothing but eye-candy while the veterans phone it in. Action scenes are barely above shoddy video game cutscenes. 2/10
 

Piscian

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Independence Day: Resurgence
Nature found a way for Roland Emmerich to direct a sequel to his 1996 alien blockbuster. It has elements of the first one which all feel dated as hell now. Everything looks fake, and the characters are fake, spitting awful lines and situation-inappropriate screaming. Young actors are nothing but eye-candy while the veterans phone it in. Action scenes are barely above shoddy video game cutscenes. 2/10
It was so bad that it reminded me of those ripoff movies that would come out on dvd side by side with the actual movies release. I recall growing up, Independency Day being wildly popular. I probably saw it a hundred times as a teenager. It was a pretty great movie. So I was doubly let down at how cheesy and stupid the new one was. I had really high hopes for it.

I think that and Pacific Rim: Rising or whatever they called sequel really murdered my childhood.


After[B] Dalisclock[/B] reminding me it existed I sat down and watch Death of Stalin. Man what a trip. I assume it was originally written as a stage play because the scene transitions seem more designed around acts. It had that perfect type of comedy is that is subtle and not hamfisted, all the characters were very believable. According the wiki the biggest complaint from historians is that it wasnt over the top enough. That the reality was even more insane than they presented and they felt some comedic moments were missed out on because of it.

I found it also amusing that Death Of Stalin royally pissed off the Russian Government. Its currently banned. I wouldn't call it patriotism, but I'm definitely appreciative of the fact that in
the western world we can get away with films that either make fun of our governments or outright accuse them of fascism.

For those looking for a zombie film thats doing something a little different I recommend a little Indie film called "The Dark" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6832388/. Its kind of the opposite of Warm Bodies. Its a zombie love story/drama pretty heart wrenching but good.
 

BrawlMan

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I think that and Pacific Rim: Rising or whatever they called sequel really murdered my childhood.
Don't be that person. Two terrible movies ain't gonna ruin what you enjoyed in the past. Only you can pile that type of misery on yourself. Not crappy or mediocre sequels.
 
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