Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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McElroy

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Guardians of the galaxy Vol. 3
Such a "movie"-movie. Almost every line is a line that nobody would utter in reality. Except in Rocket's flashback, because dead serious stuff. But hey, did that look cool? That's what it is, a cool-looking movie that's also fun in places.
6/10
 

thebobmaster

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Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Madame Web

There's this hackneyed writing tip about looking at your script and asking yourself, "Is this the most interesting period in the protagonist's life?". If the answer is no, why aren't you writing about it? Madame Web is essentially a story about how its lead character (and everybody else in this) will eventually be relevant to the Spider-Man mythos, a completely disingenuous premise because in the past 22 years I've watched 3 different live action versions of Spider-Man across at least 10 movies and not once have I seen or heard of Madame Web or her harem of schoolgirl Spider-Girls.

Cassandra Webb is a paramedic who can see the future. So can Ezekiel Sims, who was in the amazon with Cassie's mom when she was researching spiders right before she died. (Ezekiel looks the same 30 years later by the way, even though he's played by a 40 something actor). His visions indicate he'll eventually be murdered by a group of hot chicks in fetish-wear; he's somehow against it. I watched a relative slowly and painfully succumb to cancer recently and I will say now, murder by Sydney Sweeney sounds like a good deal to me.

The movie contrives for Cassie to end up protecting the three girls from Sims in a series of improbable and cringey scenes that do nothing to convince me that they're in any real danger, that any of this matters to Spider-Man or that Dakota Johnson (34) would develop a maternal bond with any of the 20 somethings pretending to be high school girls. This is a horribly banal movie that flunks every lame joke yet the more it tries to be serious the more laughable it ends up being. The biggest joke happening seconds before the credits, in which Cassie is blinded and paralyzed almost as an afterthought, yet the movie somehow pitches this as a triumphant ending to the character.
 
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thebobmaster

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Gordon_4

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Madame Web

There's this hackneyed writing tip about looking at your script and asking yourself, "Is this the most interesting period in the protagonist's life?". If the answer is no, why aren't you writing about it? Madame Web is essentially a story about how its lead character (and everybody else in this) will eventually be relevant to the Spider-Man mythos, a completely disingenuous premise because in the past 22 years I've watched 3 different live action versions of Spider-Man across at least 10 movies and not once have I seen or heard of Madame Web or her harem of schoolgirl Spider-Girls.

Cassandra Webb is a paramedic who can see the future. So can Ezekiel Sims, who was in the amazon with Cassie's mom when she was researching spiders right before she died. (Ezekiel looks the same 30 years later by the way, even though he's played by a 40 something actor). His visions indicate he'll eventually be murdered by a group of hot chicks in fetish-wear; he's somehow against it. I watched a relative slowly and painfully succumb to cancer recently and I will say now, murder by Sydney Sweeney sounds like a good deal to me.

The movie contrives for Cassie to end up protecting the three girls from Sims in a series of improbable and cringey scenes that do nothing to convince me that they're in any real danger, that any of this matters to Spider-Man or that Dakota Johnson (34) would develop a maternal bond with any of the 20 somethings pretending to be high school girls. This is a horribly banal movie that flunks every lame joke yet the more it tries to be serious the more laughable it ends up being. The biggest joke happening seconds before the credits, in which Cassie is blinded and paralyzed almost as an afterthought, yet the movie somehow pitches this as a triumphant ending to the character.
I actually paid money to see this and the worst thing was they could have had a passable movie if they’d had the good sense to rip off The Terminator because it’s not a million miles removed from it at the basic elements. And I liked Sydney Sweeney and the other Spider women. In the flash forwards they had great costumes and I felt relative to the rest of the movie their action bits were well put together.

Oh well, sometimes you just end up with a bad movie.
 
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Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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I watched Ultraman Rising on Netflix. Honestly, I don't have much to say other than it's fucking amazing what Spider-verse and Arcane have done for the animation industry. This movie had absolutely no surprises or really anything interesting with the plot, but with some solid voice acting and gorgeous animation, I had a blast.
Also, somebody had a bit too much fun with that main character design.
 

thebobmaster

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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

Swedish film maker Roy Andersson staging an absurdist, yet almost aggressively inert, satire on the modern world, or what passed as such at the turn of the Millenium.

I'm not entirely sure I would say I enjoyed Songs from the Second Floor but I certainly related to it. When people ask me why I enjoy surrealist art, I usually tell them it's for the capacity to depict things the way they feel, rather than the way they actually look. Songs is set in no specific place at no specific time. A lifeless cityscape broadly representing western Europe in the latter half of the 20th century that looks, more than anything, as if the Scandinavian love for tasteful minimalism had to adapt to a world where no one could afford the "tasteful" part of it anymore. Set in a series of austere locations whose colours range from grey, to beige, to shades of light browns and sickly greens, people with pale faces and drab clothes try to make sense of a world that doesn't.

It's difficult to describe anything that Songs has as a plotline, but there are certainly characters and things happen to them. A businessman burned down his store for insurance money, his son, bed ridden an uncommunicative in a mental clinic has, according to him, "gone nuts from writing poetry", there is a permanent traffic jam on the road, people are trapped in loveless marriages and pointless jobs, religion is fading, yet superstition is rising. It's tempting to describe the world of Songs from the Second Floor as dystopian, but it's too boring to be.

Roy Andersson makes a sincere attempt to encompass the general malaise of the modern world in a series of sterile scenes, practically all still frames, displaying the daily life of lethargic people in a lethargic world. The set design and the framing thereof certainly are the star of the show here, very rarely has a movie managed to look this depressing. Andersson imagines the nightmare of late capitalism not as one of excess and decadence but as one of boredom and stagnation. A world that scoffs at everyone not willing or capable to produce something of value but has also completely forgotten how to find value in anything.

Songs from the Second Floor, in other words, is a rather glum movie. It's slow pace and dry dialogue adding to the coldness of its general atmosphere. If a movie like Eraserhead or Brazil conveys what it feels like to be in a mental state where the normal and mundane starts to feel monstrous and oppressive, Songs conveys a kind of despair that feels tired and listless, rather than anxious. The feeling of being a grey man in a grey world that couldn't care less about you and that you couldn't care about less. Not so much comforting as providing a discomfort that is way too easy to get used to.

Songs from the Second Floor is a fairly slow and exhausting watch. A quintessential mood piece whose mood happens to be that of doing chores on a rainy day to try to distract yourself from thinking about the future. It's definitely a satire, of sorts, but it isn't exactly funny. More than anything it's a movie about the way we've come to accept the absurd as mundane and how doing so is the only way we manage to live without going mad. And perhaps about how, at some point, it will catch up to us. As the movie's nearing its conclusion, characters start to be haunted by the actual spirits of the dead and all the unpaid debts they owe them. At some point pretending you're okay runs its course and it all catches up to you. Songs from the Second Floor is a rather brutal movie but I gotta respect its clarity and laconic insight into the anxieties of the modern age.
 

BrawlMan

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YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
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Agema

Do everything and feel nothing
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I think you are spot on about this film, and yet the final mark you've offered seems generous.

It's almost the epitome of vapid bloat; the piece de resistance of dullness for a whole series chiefly characterised by being stretched way beyond the source and other spurious added material to support. Even the action is so overdone and overlong it palls. As you also note it's one of those movies were the screenwriters/director spent so long thinking "What would look cool?" that they make something risibly absurd: this adds to the sense of grinding emptiness about it.
 
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thebobmaster

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I think you are spot on about this film, and yet the final mark you've offered seems generous.

It's almost the epitome of vapid bloat; the piece de resistance of dullness for a whole series chiefly characterised by being stretched way beyond the source and other spurious added material to support. Even the action is so overdone and overlong it palls. As you also note it's one of those movies were the screenwriters/director spent so long thinking "What would look cool?" that they make something risibly absurd: this adds to the sense of grinding emptiness about it.
I can see that argument. I gave it a perfect middle-of-the-road ranking because to me, there wasn't anything actively awful about the movie, and Martin Freeman especially turned in a solid performance. There just wasn't anything else that really stood out about it. It was perfectly average.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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I watched Dressed to Kill and Body Double, Brian De Palma's pervy(er) spins on Psycho and Rear Window/Vertigo, respectively, now with more blood and tits.

Dressed to Kill stars Angie Dickinson as a disaffected, middle-aged housewife who's starved for a good fuck. In the movie's best sequence she plays cat-and-mouse with a potential fling at the Metropolitan Museum for something like 10 minutes, without a single spoken word of dialogue. The filmmaking is the good stuff, playing with misdirection and regularly building and releasing tension through the sheer precision of the camera work. The supporting cast is great too - Michael Caine, Nancy Allen and the kid from Christine. I like how they're each motivated to investigate a crime for different reasons, by different means and largely unaware of each other.

Body Double isn't as tightly packed and manages to be even more contrived than the plot of Vertigo, although plot isn't exactly the point of either. It's about a struggling actor who gets to house-sit a panopticon in L.A. and starts spying and obsessing over a neighboring woman who dances and masturbates in front of her window every night, same hour. He starts following her around when he becomes suspicious her life's in danger. Hey, he's a sex pervert but he's not a murderous sex pervert. I guess he remains more or less sympathetic because of the prevalent feeling he's being taken for a patsy, and what a fucking loser he is in the first place.

As an aside, I wonder if there's a director who can film such predictable stories in such a way as to make you so excited for what may happen next, the way De Palma does so effortlessly yet meticulously.

Both movies feature inventive voyeurs, masked killers, Dennis Franz and the shocking murder of a woman as their centerfold. Both are ridiculous, but where Dressed to Kill is a little more earnest, Body Double is meta and very over the top. One feels like the natural result of the other and a decade marked by excess and indulgence.
 

thebobmaster

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Just as a fun fact, one of the henchmen in this movie is a very early career John Leguizamo.
 
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thebobmaster

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BrawlMan

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Just as a fun fact, one of the henchmen in this movie is a very early career John Leguizamo.
Yep, there's early Robert Patrick too. That minor role lead him to be T-1000.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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Vertigo

When I first watched it I didn't think much of it. It's one of those movies that film schools like to bang on about incessantly because supposedly it represents "the failure to reconstruct an ideal", just as Citizen Kane is about "the failure to reconstruct a narrative" and Blow Up is about "the failure to reconstruct reality". Film school really glorified failure, but also the obsession leading to and resulting from it. Maybe it's really about the search itself, and the real failure is to settle.

So Vertigo is not about the mystery itself (which is bunk long before the ending) and it's definitely not glamorous or exciting (maybe why the movie didn't so very well back then). It's about a man's disturbed love for a woman who is, in order, possessed, dead, reborn, nonexistent and ultimately dead again. It's about the lies the woman tells as much as the man's attempts at shaping her in the image of those lies. There's a metaphor in there about chasing your muse (and, yes, the failure to reconstruct an ideal) that directors like.
 

Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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Deadpool & Wolverine, 6/10

The long-awaited return of both Deadpool and Wolverine (can you believe it's been 6 years since Deadpool 2?), the title is pretty much what you get. Deadpool and Wolverine both enter the MCU by getting roped into an appropriately nonsensical adventure featuring alternate universes and saving the world, with a generous slathering of the Deadpool movie style. If you've seen the previous entries then you know what to expect, there's no surprises on that front: tons (and I mean tons) of swearing, blood, violence, fourth wall breaking and incredibly juvenile and crass humor. If you enjoyed the previous movies, then you'll enjoy this, and vice versa. Deadpool seems to do best when he's paired up with a grumpy straight man to bounce off of (see Cable in Deadpool 2), and the double act Reynolds and Jackman are doing is very entertaining, they have great chemistry together.

As far as my enjoyment goes, this was pretty much in line with the previous two. It's light, fluffy, entertaining, with some new more enjoyable aspects and some less so. The meta stuff is even more in focus this time, which I really enjoyed, and can't really talk about without spoiling a ton of the surprises. Jackman's Wolverine is more like Logan than X-Men 2 in this (ie. jaded old man instead of a hotheaded tough guy), and he lends the role the appropriate gravitas to contrast with Deadpool's irreverent nature. There's a lot of action and it's really fun, you're definitely getting your money's worth on the "Wolverine vs Deadpool" front. The humor was quite hit or miss for me: there were tons of hilarious gags (especially in the beginning, and you'll know exactly what I mean when you go see it), but they were balanced out by an almost equal amount of mostly unfunny or downright cringeworthy, improv-feeling dialogue that seemed to mostly rely on sweary shock value. Speaking of, the swearing definitely went overboard and into gratuitousness. You can only hear Wolverine tell Wade to shut the fuck up before it starts to sound like it was written by a 12-year old trying to be edgy.

I don't think it's a huge spoiler that a movie about Deadpool entering the Marvel multiverse is a total cameo-fest, and those were some of the most fun parts. They dig pretty deep into the history of the whole modern superhero genre for some surprisingly satisfying parts for some long forgotten characters. There are some hilarious easter eggs and lines in there and it's done in a fun way that makes the film feel like a wholesome celebration of the superhero genre.

As much as I enjoyed this movie going even deeper into the meta stuff, I still feel like we haven't truly seen a movie that would fully encapsulate the anarchic, world-breaking nature of Deadpool's self-awareness. I started thinking that a Deadpool movie that would be a mockumentary about the making of a Deadpool movie would be a concept truly worthy of the character. I'm talking gags like deliberate continuity errors, Deadpool editing the movie in real time, rewriting the script as the movie's playing out, stepping out of the bounds of the frame etc. But that would require a more sophisticated approach than Reynolds' version, which seems to be content focusing on the "merc with a mouth" aspect of the character, rather than "comic book character who knows he's in a comic book" element. If anything, Deadpool & Wolverine, for all its entertainment value, is still indicative of the limitations of the modern superhero film: too big of a budget, the seeming need to have big effects blowouts etc. A more subversive, lower budget approach would IMO suit the character much better.
 

BrawlMan

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I love it! All of it! I don't know where you go from here! They can stop at Deadpool & Wolverine and I would be fine with it! I do say this movie is a send-off to any Fox related Marvel movies from the late 90s, 2000s, and 2010s. This is a wonderful trilogy with no bad movies at all. This movie gets the S-Rank! I never laughed and cried so hard at the same time!

I was not expecting Blade, Elektra (from the movie, not Netflix), Gambit, nor Laura/X-23 to show up! That next to last battle scene is a treat!
 
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