Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

[Bartholen]

Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore, no/10.

Or as I like to call it: Craptastic Beats: Shat beds of Bumblefuck. Or Shitheads of Fumbledolt. Or FantASStic Beasts: Dipshits of Dumbledore

I fear I may start repeating myself through this post, because there are only so many expressions to convey astonishment. Because I am truly stunned. Flabbergasted. Astounded. My mind is blown to smithereens. I can't remember the last time a film left me so shocked, let alone one I actually went to see in IMAX. I had low expectations going in, but those were blown out of the water as the film plummeted 60 feet underground, and then kept digging. This is without a doubt one of the worst written, incomprehensible, overstuffed, incoherent, padded and drawn out, tonally dissonant, tone deaf and genuinely offensive pieces of filmmaking I've ever witnessed. You could write a whole book dissecting everything this film does wrong. But I'll try to be brief.

If you were hoping that Rowling had learned any lessons about screenwriting since Crimes of Grindelwald, oh boy are you in for a disappointment and then some. In that department this film repeats every single mistake from the last film, minus the hilarious barrage of plot twists in the last 20 minutes. There are a zillion characters and subplots, and almost none of the matter for reasons I'll talk about soon. The plot is at the same time labyrinthine and impenetrable, but also completely and utterly inconsequential. Stuff just happens and you have no idea why, or what it's leading to. The film this reminded me of the most is Saaho, the utterly maddening 3-hour Bollywood crime epic, and believe me, that's not a favourable comparison. At around 15-20 minutes in the film essentially goes "Hey, let's just bumble around for the next hour or so without a reason why" out loud, and proceeds to do exactly that. It is truly a moment to behold when the film gives itself essentially a license to just do a bunch of random scenes and stuff. Thing happen because the script says so, not because the story warrants it. The characters are there because the script and marketing say so, not because the story warrants it. It's a perfect storm of not only how to not write a screenplay, but how not to write a story, period.

In terms of tone this is probably even more mismatched than the previous one, and I'll remind you that film had multiple killings of young children. It's no longer even happy scene -> horrifying scene, now the tone swaps schizophrenically around within the same scenes, and it's maddening. The fundamentally misaligned premise of a wizard pokemon trainer going around in this incomprehensible, horribly dark plot is highlighted even more when the cutesy CG creatures take over from time to time. I think I've genuinely never seen a franchise be so schizophrenic with its tone.

The action is genuinely some of the most confusing I've ever seen. This isn't an action film, but the few scenes where it happens it's often really hard to tell what's supposed to be happening. In more than one scene it plays out like a JRPG random encounter: completely separated from the physical world of the film, taking place in what seems like a demiplane. I feel the film also assumes the viewer to already know the mechanics of this world, because often I was wondering "is this some specific spell they're using here I'm supposed to recognize?"

All of this would have been... well, not fine, but somewhat acceptable (in a flabbergasting, hilariously awful way) so far. But the thing that pushed this over the line into disgust territory, and why I refuse to give it a rating is this: have you ever wondered what it would look like if a profoundly privileged multimillionaire head of a multimedia empire watched the state of the world over the last 4 years and decided: "Yes, my time is come. It is time for the world to see my commentary on the state of things"... in a children's film series. Because that's what JK Rowling decided to do here. See, the plot concerns an election. Of essentially the head of the wizarding world. And through a series of plot contrivances Grindelwald ends up not only becoming a candidate, but he wins. Grindelwald. The mass murdering, fascist, essentially racial supremacist uber-villain who's basically the Sauron of this world. This is what Joanne "JK just kidding" Rowling decided to make the plot of this giant movie production.

Do I even need to say how insanely fucking tone-deaf that is? Rowling looked at the state of the world sliding ever closer towards fascism, the proliferation of misinformation, and the erosion of institutions of democracy, and decided to make that the core element around which the entire plot revolves around. Again, in a fucking children's film series. And then it gets worse when this horrifyingly close to real life situation is resolved in the most agonizingly liberal, patronizingly childish, "trust the process" way where the truth and facts win, and the populist fascist is stripped of all his support in a matter of seconds because a magical baby goat says he's a bad guy (BTW I am not making that up). It is truly magnificent to see someone's privilege and sheltering from the real world displayed in such grandiosity through a work of fiction. No, facts don't win out because a magical baby goat says you're a bad guy. The supporters of the fascist don't just stop supporting him when the facts are revealed, quite the opposite in fact. And that's why this is not just a bad film, but IMO a vile one.

And when you start to think about it it gets even worser. Because all this could have been avoided with the tiniest rewrites. Don't make Grindelwald a candidate, make him wizard Al Capone. Let him be the moustache-twirling gangster who's pulling strings in the background. Let the german minister be his stooge through whom Grindelwald gains power. That's familiar ground in children's entertainment, that's classic villain tropes 101. The rest of the plot could have stayed exactly the same. But no, Rowling felt she really had to make such an on the nose, 1 to 1 parallel to Trump, or Orban, or pick your poison really.

Whatever few merits this film has are overshadowed by how repulsive I personally found it to such a degree that they're barely worth mentioning. Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen are great in their respective roles, even if Mikkelsen is doing a rather familiar shtick. But it's a shtick that works, and his character design is way better than Johnny Depp's was. The effects are great, even if the context in which they happen amounts to basically a theme park ride. And aside from those there's really... nothing.

Don't watch it. Or at the very least don't pay for it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I'm led to believe Rowling just rubber stamped those films, her own input on them was minimal. Could be wrong, though.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift

Set in Tokyo, and all the protagonists aren't Japanese. There's Japanese yakuza villains, though. And ladies in skimpy outfoits and cars, and they spent $85M on this film and it's very boring. I can't be bothered even booing this one.

 

[SilentPony]

I'm led to believe Rowling just rubber stamped those films, her own input on them was minimal. Could be wrong, though.

She's been rubber stamping Harry Potter since the first movie came out. She didn't write the other novels in the first series. You think studio executives would risk all those profits on her? What if she died or got a drug addiction or said something incredibly stupid and racist/homophobic?
She's been having ghost writers do the novels since Goblet of Fire, specifically to write novels that translated well into movie format. They didn't want her pulling some bullshit like on page 256 of Death Hallows saying "Oh and Hermione was black the whole time, and Harry Potter was Native America." They made sure the novels fit the movie universe.

 

[Gordon_4]

She's been rubber stamping Harry Potter since the first movie came out. She didn't write the other novels in the first series. You think studio executives would risk all those profits on her? What if she died or got a drug addiction or said something incredibly stupid and racist/homophobic?
She's been having ghost writers do the novels since Goblet of Fire, specifically to write novels that translated well into movie format. They didn't want her pulling some bullshit like on page 256 of Death Hallows saying "Oh and Hermione was black the whole time, and Harry Potter was Native America." They made sure the novels fit the movie universe.

That doesn't quite track to me since Goblet of Fire was released in 2000, which was when the film for Philosopher's Stone would have been in its primary filming stages.

 

[SilentPony]

That doesn't quite track to me since Goblet of Fire was released in 2000, which was when the film for Philosopher's Stone would have been in its primary filming stages.

No, I meant after that one. That was the last one she wrote free of studio constraints.
Sorry, should have been more clear on that.

 

[Gordon_4]

No, I meant after that one. That was the last one she wrote free of studio constraints.
Sorry, should have been more clear on that.

That suggests less to me of ghostwriters and her editor being changed up for one more familiar with screen writing.

 

[BrawlMan]

Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift

Set in Tokyo, and all the protagonists aren't Japanese. There's Japanese yakuza villains, though. And ladies in skimpy outfoits and cars, and they spent $85M on this film and it's very boring. I can't be bothered even booing this one.

I admit that I have a soft spot for Tokyo Drift, even though it's Initial D, but nowhere near as good. I still like the racing sequences, and would still watch TD over F&F6, 8, 9, or Hobbes & Shaw. Out of the original trilogy, Tokyo Drift has the best soundtrack variety and is my personal favorite.

​

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Fantastic Beasts 3: Secrets of Dumbledore

Third part of the Harry Potter prequel cycle and, much like the previous 2, a movie desperately searching for a point. I jokingly described FB2 as "Like if Hideo Kojima had written a Harry Potter prequel" which is, of course, not really accurate. The general story or themes don't much invoke any of Hideo Kojima's video games, it was effectively based on sharing his idiosyncratic pacing quirk of having an exposition dump where any comparable work would have its action climax. Secrets of Dumbledore continues what are just some plain odd methods of structuring an action blockbuster.

Based on a screenplay by J.K. Rowling, it once again plainly shows Rowling's lack of sure footing when it comes to writing a screenplay. FB3 continues the story of a group of people around a young Professor Dumbledore trying to stop evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald from starting a war against the non magical population. FB3, believe it or not, is a spy thriller.
You see, at some point Rowling decided the prequels to her famous fantastical Coming of Age story Harry Potter should be a political parable about the rise of fascism. Unfortunately at some point she also decided she'd rather read some Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy novels than, say, a history book. So FB 3 has all the aesthetic and narrative hallmarks of an espionage potboiler. People hatching schemes on a train. Election manipulation. A dinner party of international politicians. Double agents. A climax built all around switching identical looking suitcases. Fedoras and trenchcoats. It's kinda quaint, actually. The plot, as it is, is all about preventing Grindelwald from being elected the leader of the international wizard council. Viewpoint character again mainly being magical zoologist Newt Scamander who feels more and more like an afterthought in his own story. As do the eponymous Beasts, for the rec. Excepting, in this case, one specific creature that features prominently as, excuse my language, one of the most utterly moronic plot devices ever.
The writing of FB3 is not utterly irredeemable, actually, it shines on where the Harry Potter series had always been at its strongest, which is characterization. Unfortunately enough, it's also where Rowling's shortcomings as an actual screenwriter come through as the movie feels like it's rushing through a lot of pieces of character development that would have been afforded more time in a novel. I like Newt Scamander and Jacob Kowalski fine, as I do newcomers like Jessica Williams as Lally Hicks. The Harry Potter books had compelling characterization elevating what was a fairly by the numbers fantasy yarn, in Fantastic Beasts what are still fairly strong characters exist in a story that struggles to find structure. And, well, purpose.

There's a reason I'm mainly refering to the books when I refer to Harry Potter because, let me be frank, I never thought the movies as they were, were especially good. There's a certain irony in the Fantastic Beast's series attempts to capture the whimsy and charm of the Harry Potter novels when its director David Yates was one of the main people responsible for those being absent from the movie adaptations in the first place. After the first 2 (3, if we're being generous) movies, the subsequent ones mostly failed to capture the tone of the books and overall what I think people were enjoying about them in favour of something fairly bland and forgettable. Yates is just short of J.J. Abrams in being a replacable studio hack and I think him managing to occupy the position of the leading director of Harry Potter movies was a big part of the series' decline in the first place.

Fantastic Beasts 3 is not as messy as its immediate predecessor and has its redeeming qualities but even if you like Harry Potter, and it's the same focal point for nostalgia for you as it is for me, it's not really good. Watchable, I suppose, sure. I didn't have a terrible time with it, even if it did make me sometimes regret not just watching Michael Bay's Ambulance instead. At a few, very rare, occasions it managed to invoke that warm feeling of comfort I associate with Harry Potter. But in the end it just didn't properly get off the ground. I could go on a tangent now about how its confused politics reflect Rowling's as she went, over the course of a few years, from representing liberalism at its most spineless to representing conservativism at its most spiteful, or how Mads Mikkelsen replaced Johnny Depp as Grindelwald after the latter fell off the wagon, or how something similar might happen with Ezra Miller after he turned out to be kind of a creep, but all that is not really where the core issue of that series is.
The problem is, it's all just lacking direction and purpose. It's too simplistic and childish to be a political story, it's too aimless to be a fantasy epic, it's too shallow to be a character drama and it's too slow paced to be a Hollywood action blockbuster. It's struggling to add something, anything, to the Harry Potter series and yet now, 3 movies in, the series is still spinning its wheels and unwilling to commit to anything. It's not so much that it's bad as that it's pointless.

 

[Bartholen]

Mad Max, 7/10

Often overlooked in the series, this was quite an interesting watch. Having only seen Fury Road prior to this, I didn't have many set preconceptions going in. After Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome basically created the way we imagine "post-apocalypse" to look like, I feel this might actually be more interesting now than the follow-ups. The film it's most reminiscient of for me is Logan, or vice versa to be accurate, because it's what I'd call a "present-apocalyptic" movie. It's depicting a society that's clearly in severe decline, but still firmly rooted in present day: Cities are run down, the police are clearly underfunded and staffed by some questionable people and road gangs run rampant, but there's still holidays, beach houses, comfortable lives, people driving their trailers and such. And it's exactly why this hits rather uncomfortably close to home these days: the "apocalypse" likely won't be a few hours of nuclear devastation or whatever ruined the Mad Max world. It'll be decades of societal decay, ruination of institutions and weakening of law and order.

It's quite scrappy and low budget, but it uses its budget where it counts. The opening chase scene in particular had some pretty gnarly on-camera car crashes that I was genuinely impressed by. There's a lot of pretty cheesy filmmaking: sped up footage, rather convenient editing, at times strange music choices and some pretty hokey acting. The quite clearly gay-coded villains don't do this movie any favors, but it's a product of its time.

What I was probably most let down by is how after the first half the movie essentially abandons half the cast and switches gears completely. I would have preferred it to stay in the world of this morally questionable police force dealing with the hoodlums and the toll it takes on their sanity. I have a sneaking suspicion that this shift might have been for budgetary reasons, because the second half of the movie takes place in very cost-effective environments: open roads, a beach, a farm and so on. But eh, that's filmmaking for you. I have to say i loved the ending. You wouldn't see that kind of thing nowadays.

 

[Gordon_4]

Mad Max, 7/10

Often overlooked in the series, this was quite an interesting watch. Having only seen Fury Road prior to this, I didn't have many set preconceptions going in. After Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome basically created the way we imagine "post-apocalypse" to look like, I feel this might actually be more interesting now than the follow-ups. The film it's most reminiscient of for me is Logan, or vice versa to be accurate, because it's what I'd call a "present-apocalyptic" movie. It's depicting a society that's clearly in severe decline, but still firmly rooted in present day: Cities are run down, the police are clearly underfunded and staffed by some questionable people and road gangs run rampant, but there's still holidays, beach houses, comfortable lives, people driving their trailers and such. And it's exactly why this hits rather uncomfortably close to home these days: the "apocalypse" likely won't be a few hours of nuclear devastation or whatever ruined the Mad Max world. It'll be decades of societal decay, ruination of institutions and weakening of law and order.

It's quite scrappy and low budget, but it uses its budget where it counts. The opening chase scene in particular had some pretty gnarly on-camera car crashes that I was genuinely impressed by. There's a lot of pretty cheesy filmmaking: sped up footage, rather convenient editing, at times strange music choices and some pretty hokey acting. The quite clearly gay-coded villains don't do this movie any favors, but it's a product of its time.

What I was probably most let down by is how after the first half the movie essentially abandons half the cast and switches gears completely. I would have preferred it to stay in the world of this morally questionable police force dealing with the hoodlums and the toll it takes on their sanity. I have a sneaking suspicion that this shift might have been for budgetary reasons, because the second half of the movie takes place in very cost-effective environments: open roads, a beach, a farm and so on. But eh, that's filmmaking for you. I have to say i loved the ending. You wouldn't see that kind of thing nowadays.

I’m led to believe a fair few of the extras and even a couple of the principle actors in Mad Max were being paid in slabs of beer. So you’re probably dead on the money.

 

[SilentPony]

Everything Everywhere all at once: 2022.

Oh boy...settle in, I have a LOT to say about this one.

Spoiler: Its long

Okay so this is an ugly movie. Not visually necessarily, just mean spirited. First 15mins and I was ready to walk out. Premise is Michelle Yeoh is a bitchy mom of a prideful and lesbian daughter and the long suffering and resentful wife of a loser but kind husband. The daughter is fat and gay - this is important because its actually the center theme of the movie. Kind of. And the husband is always on the verge of tears because he wants to divorce his wife because despite convincing her to move to America with him, he hates their life in a failing laundromat.
Also there's a Jewish woman with a big nose they call the Big Nose Woman.
And Yeoh's father is visiting her for the first time since he disowned her and she moved away. And the family is being audited by the IRS for a tax fraud scheme involving Yeoh deducting her hobbies of singing and knitting as professional expenses.
and the daughter wants to introduce her girlfriend to her grandfather, but Yeoh is against it because the grandfather not only hates women, but gays too, and its shameful enough his only daughter had an only daughter, but if he learns she's gay, he'll die. Note Yeoh describes her daughter as just thinking she's gay.
So Yeoh introduces the girlfriend and just a good friend, and the daughter storms off in tears. Yeoh runs to catch up to her daughter and no joke, after standing there in silence for a good 5 seconds, says "Eat healthier, you're fat" and walks away.
The audience in the theater cracked up laughing as the daughter drives away in tears, utterly humiliated.

This is the emotional high of the movie. This is as good as it gets.

Okay so now at the IRS and its the Matrix. The husband is shifting in and out of an alternate universe personality where he's a desperate freedom fighter trying to stop an extra-dimensional God of all Chaos called...some incomprehensible word that keeps changing pronunciation. Im guessing this little bit missed the editors. and this God of all Chaos is waging a massive war the Alpha universe, the Prime universe, the first universe to break the barriers between universes. And she killed all the cows. This is important, the movie spends many minutes on this. The cows are dead. Remember this, because the movie sure as shit doesn't.

Okay so big reveal. Ready for it? Their daughter is the God of Chaos. Turns out Prime universe Yeoh was a brilliant scientist who discovered how to travel between universes. She also used her daughter as a test subject, forcing her to jump between universes so much she broke and became the God of Chaos. And Yeoh is the hero, mind you. They don't overtly say she forced this on her daughter to find a universe where she isn't a lesbian but...yeah...they hint at it more than once.

Anyway, up until now this has been an unpleasant if unpleasant drama movie about bad people being bad. Now its time for the writers to just stop caring about tone and character and story. Its a horror movie now! About alternate universe cultists in service to the God of Chaos trying to kill all the Yeohs in the multiverse, but also the God of Chaos wants to track them all down and see if they're special. And then there are fights. The police try to stop Yeoh but she knows Kung Fu now and fights them. and then the daughter beats a cop to death with dildos. Yes. And then another cop gorily explodes. But then its Loony Tunes and we have cartoon sound-effects on all the fight scenes, and the God of Chaos is wearing a golf outfit for some reason. And she scissors with her mom in a very erotic lesbian incest scene the movie kinda hopes you don't read to much into. And we find out the God of Chaos's ultimate plan is an everything bagel. This is the height of creativity. I mean an everything bagel. The God of Chaos put everything on this bagel, making an infinite blackhole.
And then we have the "all the cows are dead" scene. Remember this, because the movie sure as shit doesn't.

and then the God of Chaos captures Yeoh but oh wow! The father who disowned her comes back as crippled the Flash and he's like the leader of the Avengers and he's called in support to stop the God of Chaos grand-daughter and bring peace to the Multiverse. And now he has a really dark scene where he gives a box cutter to Yeoh and tells her to slit her own daughter's throat and he super duper pinkie promises he feels bad about it. And given the tone of the movie, I legit thought this was going to happen.

Yeoh doesn't kill her daughter. So grandpa Fury calls in the troops, everyone who has an alternate universe version nearby comes it - kinda implying the entire universe he's from are all logged in and watching this, including the big nose Jew. And now comes the buttplug scene. See it turns out with infinite universes(which don't include universes where the daughter isn't the God of Chaos, shut up, stop knowing what the word "infinite" means!) the best way to splinter with the current timeline and tap into the expanded multiverse to find alternate versions of yourself with skills that are relevant to the current moment is to do something random. The more random and unexpected, like picking your dad's nose and eating it(which happens) or chugging an entire bottle of orange soda(happens) or fucking a pot plant(happens), the better the chance of a major deviation and thus skill.
And the IRS agent who is conducting the investigation into Yeoh's crimes has 3 buttplugs on her desk, as trophies from the IRS for smelling so much bullshit. Their words, not mine. And now we have two supposedly Avenger dudes trying to shove buttplugs the size of your fist up their asses to access their true power, and Yeoh is trying to stop them, all the while her daughter and husband look on. and both dudes get those things up in there, in a surprisingly censored scene and Yeoh takes them out.
This scene is a good ten minutes long. I was hoping this was the climax of the story and we'd be done!

And I was right! The God of Chaos shows up, Yeoh is so fractured from doing random shit she dies. And the credits roll.
This will be the first of 3 possible endings.
Turns out the credits are for an in-universe version of this movie being watched by an alternate universe version of Yeoh where she's a famous Hollywood actor.
And then she wakes up and we have the hotdog universe. This is a universe where everyone has hotdogs for fingers, filled with mustard and ketchup. And people bite each other's hotdogs and instead of screaming in pain, its erotic as your lover gets a mustard cumshot. Also in this universe Yeoh and the IRS agent from before are lesbian lovers.

But no! The God of Chaos brings Yeoh to her temple and lets her know the everything bagel isn't a super weapon to destroy the multiverse, she just wanted to use it to kill herself in front of her mother. So I guess this movie is a metaphor for teen suicide? But by looking at the everything bagel, Yeoh turns into her own version of the Chaos God.
And then mother and daughter are rocks together. See its infinite universes, including the ones where humans never happen, and everyone is just rocks. So mother and daughter have a heart-to-heart, being rocks, no vocals, just text on screen, mother apologizing to her daughter and daughter talking about here, now, they can just be rocks, together, for as long as they want, no worries, no drama, no war, nothing but them, together, alone in a universe.
This is the second of 3 possible endings, and the best scene in the movie by a mile.

and then its over and Yeoh comes back to life and spends the next 20mins traveling between universes fucking with people. Oh and remember that war? And the grandfather leading the Avengers? Yeah, so...the movie kinda forgot that part too, and now the grandfather is working with the God of Chaos, actively trying to stop his daughter from stopping his granddaughter from killing herself. And I should point out if the God of Chaos granddaughter kills herself, its the end of the multiverse, she just dies. And everyone else dies. And grandfather Fury sends all his Avengers against his daughter to stop her from stopping the end of the multiverse, all talk of the war and dead cows forgotten.
and the movie splits between multiple plots now. One with moviestar Yeoh, one with recently divorced Yeoh finding a lesbian partner in the IRS agent, one with Yeoh at a party being drunk and annoying, and the "central" Yeoh. and I want to make it clear the movie is jumping every minute or so. And it does this for half an hour. The movie should have ended twice by now, and we're still going.

So turns out Yeoh can tap into everyone else's multiverse and fix what's fundamentally wrong with them. And she fixes the Avengers and her sexist father. Its very Remember Me. Changing memories to change people in the future.
And then the God of Chaos, even after being accepted as a fat, lazy, no-good lesbian woman by her mother and grandfather, and yes, using those words they play this off as a heart-warming family scene, still wants to kill herself. And she convinces her mom to let her go. OH! So this IS about teenage suicide, but a dark version of you fucked your child up so much, death is the answer.

Except no, Yeoh somehow...moms her way into the everything bagel and gets her daughter back and convinces her somehow, and I mean somehow because there's no dialogue for these scenes, to be a good God of Chaos.
And that's it. Mom and daughter Gods of Chaos decide to live in a shit version of their lives, but work together to make it a little less shit, all the while being completely emotionally separated from everything because they're experiencing every event of every other version of themselves at the same time.
This is the third and final of the ending.

This movie offends me. Not in the "Oh you told a gay joke and I don't like it" way. No no, this movie was written. This movie was produced. Hundreds of people worked on this. Stars read scripts. They agreed. They acted. The very concept of this movie, its execution, its very idea offends me as someone who likes stories, and using words.

Mustard cumshot and lesbian incest fantasy/10.

 

[Ezekiel]

Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder, 1971)

Damn Fassbinder's films look nice, even the lesser known ones that people don't talk about much. The way he moves the camera between all the characters and places the actors, like they're posing for a glamour magazine sometimes. Gives it a kind of heightened reality.

About an emotionally shallow, frustrated director who treats his crew like crap, who aren't that much better. They isolate each other, a theme that Fassbinder used again and again in his work. Movie has a disdain for people. There's selfishness and self-loathing.

"If you say you're making a film against power..."

"Not against power, against brutality sanctioned by the state."

Later...

"When you suddenly realize how damn bourgeois you are yourself."

Lines seem slightly self-referential to Fassbinder's work. It often criticized the state. I don't know the man's life and process enough to tell how much else of the director in the movie is himself. Would imagine not that much, because I don't know how he would have been so insanely productive as to release multiple movies a year with that personality.

Man in the hat confronting the director after another outburst, which reminded me of a famous person who recently exposed his weaknesses to the whole world with a similar action.

Now I have...

Berlin-Alexanderplatz (Criterion)
Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (Criterion)
Beware of a Holy Whore and Merchant of Four Seasons (Arrow)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Arrow)
Chinese Roulette and Fox and His Friends (Arrow)
BRD trilogy (Criterion)
World on a Wire (Criterion)
Fear Eats the Souls (Arrow)

Still want In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, but it was only released in Germany and those imports are expensive. I think most of his movies never got video releases, though.

 

[gorfias]

Blade II on Netflix (2002)
The Blade series is kinda flushed down the memory hole for some reason. Maybe, while it beat Xmen to the start of the modern comic book super hero movie run, the 1st Blade just wasn't very good. III has some things to recommend it, but 2 came out the same year as Spiderman and may have gotten lost in the shuffle.
We shouldn't forget about II. It is directed by Guillermo del Toro and it shows! Written by David Goyer. That shows too. Lot to love in this movie. Action, creepy villain. I look forward to seeing if a new run of Blade movies can match this one.

 

[Bartholen]

I’m led to believe a fair few of the extras and even a couple of the principle actors in Mad Max were being paid in slabs of beer. So you’re probably dead on the money.

If that is true that is the most australian thing I've ever heard.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Perfect Stranger: Good / Great

Halle Berry plays a reporter who goes undercover as a temp at an advertising agency in order to unearth a sex scandal involving ad executive Bruce Willis.

As much as that sounds to be about as much a rote, early 21st century movie, it's actually a pretty good one. It's a bit all over the place, but it does so intentionally as the reveal is a decent "oh shit!" moment.

 

[Piscian]

The Outfit

Pretty simple sort of stage to film thriller taking place in a "Cutters" shop. Mark Rylance plays an English suit maker, never "Tailor", whos shop is a drop point for the local mob. The movie takes place over the course of an evening on the onset of a mob war. Its somewhat transparently a usual suspects like affair with Mark playing his patrons against each other. Its more of an 8/10 rather than 9 or 10. Theres not a ton of meat to it and youre mostly just there to watch him chew scenary. Minus another point because theres a kind of twist after the story is over that really doesn't add the the story and as minimal as it is already it ends up jumping the shark needlessly.

Thay said I miss these kinds of movies. Its like were drowning in every other genre but psychological thrillers. Your tinker, tailor, soldier spies, usual suspects, rounders and what not. Movies that rely entirely on writing and acting, we just dont get enough of these, especially this particular "one room" types like 12 angry men. audiences simply do not have the attention span. This one was a welcome change.

 

[Gordon_4]

The Outfit

Pretty simple sort of stage to film thriller taking place in a "Cutters" shop. Mark Rylance plays an English suit maker, never "Tailor", whos shop is a drop point for the local mob. The movie takes place over the course of an evening on the onset of a mob war. Its somewhat transparently a usual suspects like affair with Mark playing his patrons against each other. Its more of an 8/10 rather than 9 or 10. Theres not a ton of meat to it and youre mostly just there to watch him chew scenary. Minus another point because theres a kind of twist after the story is over that really doesn't add the the story and as minimal as it is already it ends up jumping the shark needlessly.

Thay said I miss these kinds of movies. Its like were drowning in every other genre but psychological thrillers. Your tinker, tailor, soldier spies, usual suspects, rounders and what not. Movies that rely entirely on writing and acting, we just dont get enough of these, especially this particular "one room" types like 12 angry men. audiences simply do not have the attention span. This one was a welcome change.

I think it’s less to do with attention spans and more that they don’t pull audiences to cinemas any more in big enough numbers to justify release in the minds of the purse string holders. Regardless that there is still clearly an audience for these kinds of films.

 

[Agema]

Master (2022)

This is a psychological horror. Regina Hall plays Gail Bishop, a woman who has ascended to be the first black Master of Ancaster College, an old and elite university in New England. The college is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of a witch. Parallel to this is the arrival of Jasmine, a black student who occupies a room in which the first ever black student of Ancaster, back in the 1960s, hanged herself. So, as you might guess, this is really a film about race, with horror trappings. The film holds a balance between letting the viewer wonder whether there really is any supernatural force at play, or the rather more pessimistic view that this is just people: their general shittiness, personal and institutional racism, etc. and the fear and discomfort that causes.

It's quite effectively done. Although perhaps a little obvious it never gets excessively preachy, the performances are good and it's directed with some flair, and it can be genuinely unsettling in places. Worth a look, but not putting to the top of your must-see list.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Clifford The Big Red Dog: Fun / Great

Cinematic imagining of the classic children's' books about Clifford The Big Red Dog.

We only watched it because we're caring for my girlfriend's elderly aunt, and she loves movies about animals. It is shamelessly childish, but it ended up being pretty entertaining for what it is. If you're a dog lover (as I am to my dying day,) you'll like it. I was crying like a baby at the end, I mean, it's a story about a young girl trying to protect her puppy; what kind of monster's heart doesn't melt at that? I've chalked it up as yet another dog-themed movie I'll never watch again because I miss my dog, and movies about love for dogs will break me every time. Every. Single. Time. My girlfriend plays A Dog's Purpose sometimes when we argue which is only slightly less painful than if she were to say she's pregnant with another man's baby. That movie is my water-boarding or bamboo under the fingernails; I can't take it.