Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Ezekiel

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Pet Shop Boys Performance

Recorded 1991, released 2004. 100 minutes.

Wondered today if they had released any concerts on video, then was curious about that 9.1 on IMDB. West End Girls was the highlight. I like a theatrical concert. Nicely staged and lit. Sounds great. But their music isn't that good. There's a reason you probably hear the same few songs on the radio. I wouldn't know for sure, as I didn't really listen to the radio growing up, but it's probably safe to assume.
 

Gordon_4

The Big Engine
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The Three Musketeers (2011) - 9/10

This movie is weapons grade dumb at times but it has such a sense of fun and adventure married to a great cast. Also a side note but fuck the costuming in the movie is something to see. Like the Cardinal’s Guards uniforms have some of the deepest looking black and striking red I’ve ever seen on anything. And the Three Musketeers outfits have all sorts of intricate decorations on them.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Don't Breathe 2

What a bonkers movie. Again a bunch of creeps invade the home of crouching-blindman-hidden-badass, only this time he's the protagonist and we're supposed to be on his side. And while the movie does an effective job at making the invaders despicable... the blind dude is still a kidnapper and a murderer and a rapist, if I remember the first movie correctly. Power to Stephen Lang for making him likeable but I never really cared for what happened to him (or the girl in his care, but that's more to do with the fact kids are practically unkillable in horror movies).
 

Hawki

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So awhile ago I watched Afterlife and Welcome to Raccoon City, but in the case of the latter, said I was on the fence as to where it fell in terms of ranking. Settled on the following:

7) Retribution
6) The Final Chapter
5) Afterlife
4) Apocalypse
3) Extinction
2) Welcome to Raccoon City
1) Resident Evil

You might raise an eyebrow as to why I'm putting the 2002 film over WtRC, and if this was based purely on faithfulness, they'd be the other way round. However, as films in of their own right, I think the 2002 film edges things out. The TL, DR reason is that while WtRC has higher highs, it just sort of 'collapses' in its last 10-20% of runtime. The 2002 film's characters are more generic, but the pacing and storytelling remains consistent. The ending sections are as solid as the starting sections for instance.

But that's just me.
 

Ezekiel

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Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981)

Lonely young David Bowie fangirl falls progressively farther into heroine addiction. Found it pretty good. Couldn't tell until the very end (more than two hours) if she was gonna come out of it.



It has the Batman '89 syndrome, where the whole city (or at least the youth) is obsessed with one musician. Any time she's in the nightclub, there's Bowie playing too. Most of the score for the movie is Bowie, with a lot of Brian Eno collaborations (ambient tracks from Low and Heroes).

It's a German non-HDR UHD. I picked the original mono rather than the 5.1. Rather liked the dark color timing. Picture looked slightly processed. Might be a 2K upscale. The English subtitles were... not great. Too liberal.



She's asking if he feels anything sleeping with his johns. Should have written something like, "Do you feel anything?" How they wrote it makes it sound like she is interested, rather than the intended idea that she doesn't want him doing it for pleasure (being monogamous).



The man is screaming, "Not in the face!" They didn't sub it. You can argue it's not important, but I think it should be there because it emphasizes her rage more. There was a lot they didn't sub.



He tells her to think about think about it (doing H for the first time) once more.



She says Kessi doesn't need anyone around her who gives her foolish thoughts.

I didn't capture all the problems that I noticed, and there were probably a lot more that slipped by my deteriorated German. Also noticed some bad grammar and lack of punctuation, like periods missing at the end of sentences, but those were few.
 

thebobmaster

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Don't Breathe 2

What a bonkers movie. Again a bunch of creeps invade the home of crouching-blindman-hidden-badass, only this time he's the protagonist and we're supposed to be on his side. And while the movie does an effective job at making the invaders despicable... the blind dude is still a kidnapper and a murderer and a rapist, if I remember the first movie correctly. Power to Stephen Lang for making him likeable but I never really cared for what happened to him (or the girl in his care, but that's more to do with the fact kids are practically unkillable in horror movies).
If it helps at all, both the director and Stephen Lang have said that Don't Breathe 2 is essentially a bad guy vs worse guys. The Blind Man isn't meant to be sympathetic as such, just the lesser evil.
 
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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Miami Vice (2006)

Michael Mann's adaptation of the buddy cop series by the same name he used to produce all the way back in the 80's, starring Coling Farell and Jamie Foxx. You know, I really like Michael Mann. He is one of those directors who has not only a very specific style but keeps exploring very specific subject matters, which makes it interesting to follow his filmography. He treads a very thin line between grit and romanticism in his movies. In many ways I consider him the successor of the great pioneers of American Westerns, replacing the American badlands with with the equally lawless streets of the modern metropolis, finding the same majestic beauty in highways and skycrapers that the likes of John Ford found in the jagged rocks of Monument Valley and the same type of adventure, drama and romance in the lifes of its modern lawmen and bandits. Throughout his career he has found countless angles to explore those. Miami Vice (2006) is considered to be one of his more openly formalists takes on that subject matter, which is one of the main reasons it's one of his most divisive works (disregarding his most recent outing "Blackhat", which is still ony my watchlist)

Miami Vice is about undercover cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs busting a drug cartel. It's somewhat amusing to think of it as a non comedic version of Bad Boys 2, but not exactly a very descriptive one. On face value, it's a fairly regular cop story, there are tense negotiations with higher up gang members, a taboo romance between Crockett and a woman working for the cartel, it follows what are mostly predictable plot points for this kind of story. Miami Vice is, though, before anything else, a mood piece. Collateral saw Mann experimenting with digital photography, Miami Vice puts its photography front an center. Dialogue takes a backseat to lighting and colour when it comes to conveying the mood of a scene. Closeups are as close as they can be to provide a clear view of all the little cracks in the main characters professional stoicism. Mann wants you to feel the heat of a south american night and the cool breeze of a speedboat cruise. Lynch's Inland Empire utilized a digital hand camera to depict the incomprehensible and otherwordly tribulations of Laura Dern's character with the matter of fact naturalism of a mid 00's YouTube upload, Mann's higher resolution camera work in Miami Vice uses the format's increased naturalism to immerse the viewer in the atmosphere and emotion of a scene. The color of the sky, the waves of the sea, the wind in the palm trees and, of course, the expression of the actors, all those little signs of anxiety or elations, do the talking to the point that the dialogue itself, consisting to about 80% of criminologic jargon, feels frequently like a mere obligation.
Miami Vice is less concerned than most of Mann's work with the ethics and morals of crime and law enforcement. Aside from the romantic subplot between Crockett and gangster moll Isabelle, no one is really conflicted about their own or anyone elses position in all this. Many a Mann movie puts the crisis of reconciling professional life and private life to the forefront, the characters of inherent Vice have long surrendered themselves to the knowledge that for them, the only way to have a private life, is to make it a part of their professional life. Crockett tries to rebel against this universal constant and gets beaten back into line. People drift apart like speedboats on a sea and all that's left is to watch them wistfully.

Miami Vice is not Mann's masterpiece but it is probably his most interesting experiment in visual storytelling. And attempt to distill the tender poetry of the neonlit city, the blue sea and the overcast sky while filtering out all the artificialty and all the distance put between viewer by the conventional filming techniques. The camera movements are unstable, the nights are dark and grainy, illuminated by polluted light or accentuated with inky blues and blacks. Transcendent beauty is found mainly out at sea or among the clouds, while Miami Vice's characters find themselves incapable to escape grime, the heat and the humidity of the slums of South America or the streets of Miami, their near dissociative anxiety reflected in shaky camera work and blurred backgrounds, their moral ambivalence in the blurry constrasts of digital chiaroscuro. There's a feverish beauty to Miami Vice, wholly seperate from the surgical sobriety of a Heat or Insider that sidesteps the conventions of regular drama and provides a deeply immersive portrait not of the life, but the mindscape of Mann's men who live on the edge.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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The Northman

What a great movie. Less intimate (or surprising) than The Witch and The Lighthouse but beautiful, gruesome, esoteric, intense and awesome all the same. There's a very simple revenge story in the works and a lot is given away even if you don't know which Shakespeare play was inspired by this particular Nordic folklore. But Robert Eggers shoots it with death metal energy that's slow and deliberate and everythng's underlit in a haunting expressionistic way and Norse foilklore shows up in the form of awesome cosmic visions that cut into the story without taking away the brutal realism of 985 AD Viking country and there's a ritual dimension to the simplest tasks and actions in the movie that capture the rhythm and spirit and mentality of another era. In different hands this would be basically an action movie in drag and that's probably what most people think they're gonna get if they don't know who made the movie. But this is a revenge movie in the sense Twin Peaks is a cop show and Drive is about fast cars. Would love to see it again ASAP.
 

BrawlMan

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Miami Vice (2006)

Michael Mann's adaptation of the buddy cop series by the same name he used to produce all the way back in the 80's, starring Coling Farell and Jamie Foxx. You know, I really like Michael Mann. He is one of those directors who has not only a very specific style but keeps exploring very specific subject matters, which makes it interesting to follow his filmography. He treads a very thin line between grit and romanticism in his movies. In many ways I consider him the successor of the great pioneers of American Westerns, replacing the American badlands with with the equally lawless streets of the modern metropolis, finding the same majestic beauty in highways and skycrapers that the likes of John Ford found in the jagged rocks of Monument Valley and the same type of adventure, drama and romance in the lifes of its modern lawmen and bandits. Throughout his career he has found countless angles to explore those. Miami Vice (2006) is considered to be one of his more openly formalists takes on that subject matter, which is one of the main reasons it's one of his most divisive works (disregarding his most recent outing "Blackhat", which is still ony my watchlist)

Miami Vice is about undercover cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs busting a drug cartel. It's somewhat amusing to think of it as a non comedic version of Bad Boys 2, but not exactly a very descriptive one. On face value, it's a fairly regular cop story, there are tense negotiations with higher up gang members, a taboo romance between Crockett and a woman working for the cartel, it follows what are mostly predictable plot points for this kind of story. Miami Vice is, though, before anything else, a mood piece. Collateral saw Mann experimenting with digital photography, Miami Vice puts its photography front an center. Dialogue takes a backseat to lighting and colour when it comes to conveying the mood of a scene. Closeups are as close as they can be to provide a clear view of all the little cracks in the main characters professional stoicism. Mann wants you to feel the heat of a south american night and the cool breeze of a speedboat cruise. Lynch's Inland Empire utilized a digital hand camera to depict the incomprehensible and otherwordly tribulations of Laura Dern's character with the matter of fact naturalism of a mid 00's YouTube upload, Mann's higher resolution camera work in Miami Vice uses the format's increased naturalism to immerse the viewer in the atmosphere and emotion of a scene. The color of the sky, the waves of the sea, the wind in the palm trees and, of course, the expression of the actors, all those little signs of anxiety or elations, do the talking to the point that the dialogue itself, consisting to about 80% of criminologic jargon, feels frequently like a mere obligation.
Miami Vice is less concerned than most of Mann's work with the ethics and morals of crime and law enforcement. Aside from the romantic subplot between Crockett and gangster moll Isabelle, no one is really conflicted about their own or anyone elses position in all this. Many a Mann movie puts the crisis of reconciling professional life and private life to the forefront, the characters of inherent Vice have long surrendered themselves to the knowledge that for them, the only way to have a private life, is to make it a part of their professional life. Crockett tries to rebel against this universal constant and gets beaten back into line. People drift apart like speedboats on a sea and all that's left is to watch them wistfully.

Miami Vice is not Mann's masterpiece but it is probably his most interesting experiment in visual storytelling. And attempt to distill the tender poetry of the neonlit city, the blue sea and the overcast sky while filtering out all the artificialty and all the distance put between viewer by the conventional filming techniques. The camera movements are unstable, the nights are dark and grainy, illuminated by polluted light or accentuated with inky blues and blacks. Transcendent beauty is found mainly out at sea or among the clouds, while Miami Vice's characters find themselves incapable to escape grime, the heat and the humidity of the slums of South America or the streets of Miami, their near dissociative anxiety reflected in shaky camera work and blurred backgrounds, their moral ambivalence in the blurry constrasts of digital chiaroscuro. There's a feverish beauty to Miami Vice, wholly seperate from the surgical sobriety of a Heat or Insider that sidesteps the conventions of regular drama and provides a deeply immersive portrait not of the life, but the mindscape of Mann's men who live on the edge.
I never saw it theaters, but eventually got the movie on DVD. This movie got way too much from certain audiences. "It's not like the TV show!". I liked the movie overall.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)

This has a special place in my heart for two reasons. Firstly, it's probably pretty much the last movie that Hammer Film Productions made that's good, and secondly it's got Caroline Munro in (q.v. this thread #2940). I loved Hammer for its horror movies - they were always cheap and the quality was often sorely lacking towards the end, but it was most of my induction to horror movies. Hammer eventually collapsed because so many other competitors for that niche sprung up in the late 60s-70s, and saturation of the market destroyed its viability - although I'd also have to accept that its best days were done anyway. The brand name floated around and was re-applied for some films in the last ten years, but I couldn't really give a monkeys about the new stuff: it's just the name without the style and character of the originals.

Anyway, the film. It's actually a cross of horror and swashbuckler. It's set around probably the 17th Century, and dashing Captain Kronos roams the English countryside hunting vampires. He's called in by an old brother-in-arms because the local population are found dead of accelerated ageing. A slightly unconventional form of vampire, but Kronos points out there are many different types, and thus Kronos must also find out what this form of vampire's weakness is. Along the way, Kronos and his assistant release a Gypsy woman, Carla, from the stocks - her crime being dancing on a Sunday - who joins their band to hunt down and put the head vampire to the sword.

It is cheap, the picture quality is quite poor even by 70s standards, the performances are nothing to shout about... but it's a good, fun movie. Surely in a better world it would have deserved at least one sequel, even if the law of diminishing returns would have taken its toll.
 

Gordon_4

The Big Engine
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I never saw it theaters, but eventually got the movie on DVD. This movie got way too much from certain audiences. "It's not like the TV show!". I liked the movie overall.
Didn’t Michael Mann actually cut his early directing teeth on the first couple of seasons of Miami Vice?
 

PsychedelicDiamond

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Didn’t Michael Mann actually cut his early directing teeth on the first couple of seasons of Miami Vice?
He was producer and, I think, at least informally the showrunner for the first three seasons. He doesn't actually have directing credits on any of the shows episodes, but from what I've seen of it, his handwriting is all over it.
 
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Xprimentyl

Made you look...
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The Kill Bill Duology.


So fucking good....they don't movies like they used too.
All they do nowadays is "movies like they used to." They're not necessarily better, but you can throw a rock in any cardinal direction, and it'll bounce off a remake of an old movie/idea and land on another remake of an old movie/idea. And Tarantino films tend to be a genre all their own, for better or worse, so I wouldn't necessarily set them as a standard by which to gauge cinema in general.

That said, yes, the Kill Bill movies are pretty good.
 

gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
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The Northman

What a great movie. Less intimate (or surprising) than The Witch and The Lighthouse but beautiful, gruesome, esoteric, intense and awesome all the same. There's a very simple revenge story in the works and a lot is given away even if you don't know which Shakespeare play was inspired by this particular Nordic folklore. But Robert Eggers shoots it with death metal energy that's slow and deliberate and everythng's underlit in a haunting expressionistic way and Norse foilklore shows up in the form of awesome cosmic visions that cut into the story without taking away the brutal realism of 985 AD Viking country and there's a ritual dimension to the simplest tasks and actions in the movie that capture the rhythm and spirit and mentality of another era. In different hands this would be basically an action movie in drag and that's probably what most people think they're gonna get if they don't know who made the movie. But this is a revenge movie in the sense Twin Peaks is a cop show and Drive is about fast cars. Would love to see it again ASAP.
Lucky! It isn't around here for over another week!
I feel sorry for anyone that hasn't seen The Witch yet. Lighthouse is an interesting piece of work as well.
Looking forward to seeing this soon.
 

Samtemdo8

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So I just watched Kick Ass 1 and 2 Back to Back for the first time.

I had super low expectations with this movie, and I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting this to be Scott Pilgrim level stupid. Turns out it was more gritty and real then that.
 
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gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
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Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off HBO-Max 8.5/10

Wow.

I did some skateboarding as a kid around 1978, not knowing it was something kind of popular at the time. I didn't really know Tony Hawk until the games around 1999. I played them with my kids.

And this documentary comes out and you find out what a talented, driven fellow this Tony Hawk is. And what an interesting life story. From a star, to a guy that can't pay his water bill even with the help of a room mate, to the guy worth $140 million today.

And you get to see his contemporaries. I knew them as playable characters in the games. The game models had them in their early to mid 20s. The real people are in the mid 50s after a lifetime of abuse of their bodies pursuing a thing they love.

You get to see a man known for his singular sports abilities, but the fallible growing man trying to be a person he knows he should be.

Just an amazing trip on so many levels.

 
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BrawlMan

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So I just watched Kick Ass 1 and 2 Back to Back for the first time.

I had super low expectations with this movie, and I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting this to be Scott Pilgrim level stupid. Turns out it was more gritty and real then that.
I only like the first Kick-Ass movie. The second movie was way too cynical and up its own ass with its edginess and shock value. I still to this day have not bought the second movie. As far as I'm concerned, only the first movie exists. The fact that they tried to be more cynical like the comics sequels was not helping.