Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Thaluikhain

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Oh, way back in high school we were doing the Truman Show for English, had to watch that over and over. They also made us watch Big Brother for a whole week, which is seven days.

Seven days.

Yeah, the whole thing is messed up, that was the point.
 

Bob_McMillan

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I mean, yeah, the mere existence of the Truman Show implies that the world is pretty much fucked. But I wasn't very satisfied with that. I kinda refuse to believe that a world that wholeheartedly condones essentially slavery is the same world where you are allowed to spend any time not being a cog in the corporate machine. From what little we saw of the real world, everything seems pretty normal. People hang out bars. Policemen laze around at the job. Old women are parked in front of the TV. I guess you could say that was commentary on how the silence ordinary people lets horrible things happen, but it bothered me. Required too much suspension of disbelief from me I suppose.
 

Thaluikhain

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I mean, yeah, the mere existence of the Truman Show implies that the world is pretty much fucked. But I wasn't very satisfied with that. I kinda refuse to believe that a world that wholeheartedly condones essentially slavery is the same world where you are allowed to spend any time not being a cog in the corporate machine. From what little we saw of the real world, everything seems pretty normal. People hang out bars. Policemen laze around at the job. Old women are parked in front of the TV. I guess you could say that was commentary on how the silence ordinary people lets horrible things happen, but it bothered me. Required too much suspension of disbelief from me I suppose.
There's millions of slaves in the real world. Admittedly, not so many are in huge reality TV shows.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Guns Akimbo

I enjoyed it well enough. Definitely a dumb movie, with dumb action, but it knows it's dumb and swerves into it hard. There's some pretty entertaining scenes. It also has the image that basically summarized 2020 in a nutshell.

View attachment 4111
Ah, yes that's the name! I'll give it another go with a different mindset, as the first attempt was made in a depressive bad mood so the cliched rom-com love interest moment did grate a little more sharply than it would've done in a calmer state.
 

09philj

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Mulholland Drive
I have no idea what happened in that and I'm pretty sure David Lynch is fucking with me so I'm not going to try to work it out. I definitely saw some things happen to some characters.
???/???

LA Confidential
I like a good twisty conspiracy thriller. A look back to the good old days when Kevin Spacey hadn't allegedly arranged for the people he allegedly sexually assaulted to be murdered, Russell Crowe was in good films, and yet Danny DeVito almost exactly the same as he is now.
8/10
 
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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Southland Tales (Cannes Cut)

Southland Tales is an odd movie, by any definition, an erratic Sci-Fi action comedy with an all-star cast satirizing Post 9/11 America and telling a very sprawling and very convoluted time travel story that's set up in a trilogy of tie in comicbooks. You can't fault it, and writer/director Richard Kelly, for not being ambitious but... well, let's say audiences and critics back in 2007 weren't feeling it. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it failed to find a fanbase for itself, was cut down by around 20 minutes for its theatrical release and ended up a commercial and critical bomb. It was one of those movies that were bound to find themselves a cult audience somewhere along the line but it was bound to take a while.

The original festival cut has always been a bit of a holy grail for me and now, more than 10 years later, there was enough interest in it for it to finally get a home release. Mind you, it's not Justice League, Southland Tales' extended version is still, by all means the, same movie as its theatrical cut. Some minor roles are slightly expanded, some exposition dumps cut, some music has been added, some scenes been shuffled around... it's been too long since I've seen the theatrical cut for me to compare them side by side, but for all intents and purposes, it's still the same Southland Tales, only more of it and with somewhat better pacing. But what is it about, then?

Well, it's the year 2008. Following the detonation of a nuke in Texas, the American government, now headed by an all powerful Republican Party, has implemented an omnipresent mass surveillance system called USIdent, the only opposition left being a number of far left terrorist cells consisting mostly of idealists, opportunists and artists but having a few sympathisers among public figures like pornstar turned celebrity (now we'd call her an influencer) Krysta Now, the mistress of action film star Boxer Santaros who's married to the daughter of a powerful senator. Also, there's a sleazy german businessman who managed to find a supernatural energy source called Liquid Karma he's mining from a rift in the space time continuum, experiments with which caused Police Officer Roland Taverner to have two versions of himself exist simultaneously and... you know what, I give up

Southland Tales' narrative is a maximalist sprawl that's heading off in too many different directions at once to describe, presented as a pop art collage that invokes Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and the Coen's Big Lebowski, as where the writing, all silly names, tongue in cheek musical numbers and political conspiracies, invokes a Thomas Pynchon novel, though more the Crying of Lot 49 or Bleeding Edge type than the Gravity's Rainbow or V type. It's not as sophisticated or creative an abstracted depiction of a post 9/11 world as fellow pop surrealist Goichi Suda's brilliant video game Killer 7, which predates it by a few years. Southland Tales, behind its ambition, and its rather impressive production values, often betrays a somewhat adolescent approach to its subject matter, a kind of edgy fratboy attitude that it doesn't feel self aware enough about to make it work.

Scenes like a staged incidence of police brutality going awry when the people involved are actually being killed by a ruthless cop or a sleazy businessman cutting off a Japanese politicians hand might pass as actual punk, other like an animated sequence of two cars humping each other or a political talk show consisting exclusively of porn actresses making suggestive comments feel more like they've been transplanted from Mike Judge's embarassing comedic misfire Idiocracy. Generally speaking, Southland Tales walks a very thin line between actual, pertinent satire, a lot of which very much still holds up, and bratty anti establishment posturing that feels rather quaint and, well, a bit tryhard, providing mockery of a broken system, but not the insight necessary to imbue it with meaning.

That said, where Southland Tales works, it works and even now, having watched it for the first time in a while, a lot of it still holds up. It's creative, stylishly directed, features some delightfully hammy performances and writing that, while spotty, mostly lives up to its ambitions as both a weird, quirky science-fiction movie and a succesful satire of America during the second term of the Bush administration. It is an ambitious project and honestly, especially considering Richard Kelly's relative inexperience when he made it, it's pretty impressive that it works as well as it does. Southland Tales is not a masterpiece, but it's a lot closer to one than people were, for the longest time, ready to give it credit for.
 

Agema

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Jolt (2021)

Jolt is a sort of "Crank-lite" comedy actioner starring Kate Beckinsale as a woman with some psychological anger disorder that causes excessive cortisol levels giving her intermittent rage and unusual strength that she restrains with an experimental sort of electroshock therapy. As a biologist, I am slightly appalled at this cortisol explanation, because an excess of cortisol (a.k.a. "Cushing's Syndrome") does this, rather than give a person super-strength:
1627200914449.png

But anyway. For some contrived reason, Kate's character is set loose to rampage over New York on a personal revenge mission, slightly John Wick style. Stanley Tucci is the main other actor of any renown unless you count a notable cameo, although Bobby Canavale and Laverne Cox you'll have heard of. What on earth possessed Tucci to get involved in this? I get Beckinsale, she's been following a cut-price Liam Neeson career route for years, but was he just bored with a lack of work during lockdown?

Everything falls apart right at the start. It starts with an overlong and dreadful load of sheer expostion. Then, I have never seen NY look less like NY. That's because it was filmed in London and Bulgaria with a bit of dressing-up, and it shows: probably the worst fake NY you will ever see. The budget is shoestring (hence London and Bulgaria). Cheap SFX, ho-hum fight scenes where the stunt actor is comically obviously not Kate Beckinsale but a much beefier person in a wig. These are just the small things, though.

The script is incredibly poor. It's clearly aiming at some witty, amusing dialogue. I am unsure whether the script is so bad it was unsalvageable, or the director and actors just phoned it in - either way, it misses the mark. The plot judders (jolts?) from one place to the next with a load of stuff going on I can guarantee you won't give a toss about, and style and action scenes way too far below the quality of something like John Wick or Crank. Perhaps most frustratingly, you can see a few bits which could have been good - if done slightly differently or in someone else's hands or with a bigger budget. But they weren't. It maybe teeters on the level of a movie you could watch just to enjoy how bad it is, but mostly, I think it's just a total failure.
 
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Thaluikhain

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Descendants 3. Now there's way too many supporting characters for the film to give them all stuff to do.

I did like that some of the inherent flaws in their society became plot points. There's more turning into dragons, and during one of the songs two characters not singing make very good "stop singing and get on with it" faces, so there's that.
 

Agema

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Mulholland Drive
I have no idea what happened in that and I'm pretty sure David Lynch is fucking with me so I'm not going to try to work it out. I definitely saw some things happen to some characters.
???/???
Spoilered potential explanation:

At core, aspiring actress has an affair with a more successful actress, has the more successful actress murdered due to extreme jealousy, then commits suicide. The main plot of the film you could read as the thoughts (dream?) of the aspiring actress leading up to her suicide: a fantasy about how she wished things had happened, which turns into a nightmare as reality gradually consumes it. This concept is arguably not dissimilar to an interpretation of Lynch's also very ambiguous "Lost Highway", which is that the lead character (played by Bill Pullman) constructs a fantasy identity (even has a full-blown psychotic episode) to cover the unhappy reality of his own life.

Either way, I think both movies are not necessarily there to be readily made sense of: they are films of atmosphere and imagery rather than coherent plot, perhaps to be felt rather than understood. I would suggest Lynch is not "fucking with" the audience as that suggests some sort of malice or sense of superiority which I don't think exists. He just has very limited interest in narrative.

There are some odd little subplots that never go anywhere - IIRC apparently because it was originally envisaged as a pilot for a TV series, so there are threads in there which would have been other strands to develop in the putative series, even though it was ultimately made as a standalone movie.
 

Thaluikhain

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DOA. The 1949 or 1950 one, not the one based on the game.

A guy goes into a police station to report that he's been murdered, and then the whole movie is a flashback of him realising he's been given a slow acting poison and trying to find out who did it before he dies. Final confrontation takes place where the final confrontation of Blade Runner would some decades later.

Nice idea, but annoying main character. And all films from this period seem to have terrible love interests.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Apr 29, 2020
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Guns Akimbo (2nd take?)
Aight, trying again with a little help from my old friend "Rum and Lilt and cider" this time. Made it past the scene, which wasn't even real canon god damnit! This is why I don't like watching anything alone, as a single arsey whim is enough to quit anything at any time for any silly depressed reason, whereas if another person's in the room, the moral support usually overrides moments of despair. Turned out quite fun in the end, definitely dumb, but more like cartoon logic dumb. Slapstick humour from having guns instead of hands is an endless well of amusing gags, and a cast of unexpected talent including Samantha Weaving further carving out the action heroine future of roles. Still can't help but cringe at basic gamer references though, that might be a personal issue.

Werewolves Within
'People stuck in a small place panicking to survive' comedy horror seems like a good genre so far, and the grapevine made some positive rumblings about this. So perhaps it was inevitable that when the Ubisoft logo popped up at the start, all that Rum and Lilt and Cider got spurted out all over the freshly mopped floor. Is this a fucking videogame?? Never heard of this before. A quick interweb search later...



Werewolves Within is a multiplayer VR game for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, developed by Red Storm Entertainment and published by Ubisoft and released on 6 December 2016.

-

The film received generally positive reviews from reviews from critics, becoming the highest rated video game adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes.
It is! It is an obscure VR videogame adaption! And...not shit?? Excuse me, gotta mentally process this for a bit.
 
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Piscian

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Blood Red Sky - netflix

Watched it today and I was pretty impressed. They managed to take a very campy subject and write a plane hijacking movie better than anything I've seen in that genre of action. Theres nothing to spoil about the premise. If you've seen so much as the movie poster you know whats happening here. Terrorists hijack a plane only to find out theres a vampire on board and chaos ensues. In this case its a German mom headed to America where scientists think they may be able to help her. The movie is surprisingly well made. Theres zero camp, this is more often a drama more than anything else. Theres some really empathetic heartfelt moments that more than make up for any problems the movie might have. What I enjoyed most is that theres no real stupidity or anything too close to shark jumping. Everyone pretty much acts the way real people do. The vampires kid is sort of the supporting hero. Despite being very young he knows exactly whats going on with his mom and acts very mature for his age, while still emotionally a child. It makes sense when the back story is revealed. I will admit theres a deus ex machina here in that one of the terrorists is out of his mind and that facilitates some of the plot. He's a very Tim Roth turned up to 11. It all still works, but he's a bit of a comicbook trope villain.

I could swear this is adapted from a comicbook, but I can't any evidence online. It's way too well thought out for a hollywood script. I keep thinking of the 30 days of night comic series, it reminds me of that very very specifically. The monster designs, story everything screams 30 days of night.

If I'd give it any faults theres a couple technical issues that are easy to glaze over, if you're not the type to nitpick. I'd give it around a 7/10. Its exceptionally long and dense, because they due flashbacks explaining the vampire stuff in almost unnecessary detail. It works on netflix, but I think they would have cut about 10 minutes in theaters. Atleast if it was a hollywood pic.

If nothing else I can confirm this is not typical Netflix shovelware. This one was made with care and is imminently watchable.

*leave it on german with subtitles. This is a cross language film because it's a transatlantic flight so around 30-40% of the audio is in German and the rest is in English. The dubbed version is awful so I'd say even if you don't like subtitles just grit your way through, in context it'll make a lot more sense than dubbing. Theres actual scenes where language plays a role in the story.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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Jolt (2021)

Jolt is a sort of "Crank-lite" comedy actioner starring Kate Beckinsale as a woman with some psychological anger disorder that causes excessive cortisol levels giving her intermittent rage and unusual strength that she restrains with an experimental sort of electroshock therapy. As a biologist, I am slightly appalled at this cortisol explanation, because an excess of cortisol (a.k.a. "Cushing's Syndrome") does this, rather than give a person super-strength:
View attachment 4118

But anyway. For some contrived reason, Kate's character is set loose to rampage over New York on a personal revenge mission, slightly John Wick style. Stanley Tucci is the main other actor of any renown unless you count a notable cameo, although Bobby Canavale and Laverne Cox you'll have heard of. What on earth possessed Tucci to get involved in this? I get Beckinsale, she's been following a cut-price Liam Neeson career route for years, but was he just bored with a lack of work during lockdown?

Everything falls apart right at the start. It starts with an overlong and dreadful load of sheer expostion. Then, I have never seen NY look less like NY. That's because it was filmed in London and Bulgaria with a bit of dressing-up, and it shows: probably the worst fake NY you will ever see. The budget is shoestring (hence London and Bulgaria). Cheap SFX, ho-hum fight scenes where the stunt actor is comically obviously not Kate Beckinsale but a much beefier person in a wig. These are just the small things, though.

The script is incredibly poor. It's clearly aiming at some witty, amusing dialogue. I am unsure whether the script is so bad it was unsalvageable, or the director and actors just phoned it in - either way, it misses the mark. The plot judders (jolts?) from one place to the next with a load of stuff going on I can guarantee you won't give a toss about, and style and action scenes way too far below the quality of something like John Wick or Crank. Perhaps most frustratingly, you can see a few bits which could have been good - if done slightly differently or in someone else's hands or with a bigger budget. But they weren't. It maybe teeters on the level of a movie you could watch just to enjoy how bad it is, but mostly, I think it's just a total failure.
Nah clearly you're just an old guy who underestimates women and the film is great (This is a joke based on one of the lines they used in one of the trailers that may or may not be a line in the actual film).

I have to say I saw the film pop up on Prime and well I do like Kate Beckingsale so it was on my radar as a maybe but it sound like I'd be better off skipping it to be honest.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Guns Akimbo (2nd take?)
Aight, trying again with a little help from my old friend "Rum and Lilt and cider" this time. Made it past the scene, which wasn't even real canon god damnit! This is why I don't like watching anything alone, as a single arsey whim is enough to quit anything at any time for any silly depressed reason, whereas if another person's in the room, the moral support usually overrides moments of despair. Turned out quite fun in the end, definitely dumb, but more like cartoon logic dumb. Slapstick humour from having guns instead of hands is an endless well of amusing gags, and a cast of unexpected talent including Samantha Weaving further carving out the action heroine future of roles. Still can't help but cringe at basic gamer references though, that might be a personal issue.
Glad you ended up enjoying it.

It's a fun movie. Not smart, or deep, but it knows what it is and revels in its trashiness in a very entertaining way. The first 20 minutes or so after the guns are bolted to his hands are definitely the best part of the movie and it's rather downhill from there, but it still kept my attention until the end. It's the perfect kind of movie to watch on streaming with some friends over rather than in theaters.
 
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Dalisclock

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The funny thing is, reception on the movie is great from the audience and casual viewer side, and B. Jordan's gonna be making a Rainbow Six spin-off. This movie is the jumping off point. I'm actually excited. The film itself I thought as fine and competently made. Good action, but nothing new you have not seen before.
Wait, they're finally doing a Rainbow 6 movie? I'm shocked it took like 20 years. Seems like Hollywood would jump on a the whole idea of a a spec ops team that gets to run around the world killing terrorists, especially since the bad guys in the book were eco-terrorists(and they could alway swap those out if they wanted to).

Then again, most people probably didn't know Rainbow 6 was a thing for the longest time.
 

Mister Mumbler

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It is! It is an obscure VR videogame adaption! And...not shit?? Excuse me, gotta mentally process this for a bit.
It (the videogame and subsequent movie) are based on the party game Werewolf (or Mafia, or whatever they want to call it);


It's like an onion, there's layers.

Wait, they're finally doing a Rainbow 6 movie? I'm shocked it took like 20 years.
Right? Out of all his books, Rainbow 6 always seemed like the easy shoe-in for adaptation, especially back when they had Willem Dafoe as Clark for Clear And Present Danger.
 

BrawlMan

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Wait, they're finally doing a Rainbow 6 movie? I'm shocked it took like 20 years. Seems like Hollywood would jump on a the whole idea of a a spec ops team that gets to run around the world killing terrorists, especially since the bad guys in the book were eco-terrorists(and they could alway swap those out if they wanted to).

Then again, most people probably didn't know Rainbow 6 was a thing for the longest time.
B. Jordan is a big fan of the Rainbow Six games. He's made that clear in interviews.

Most people know what Rainbow Six is, even if they've never read the books. I do admit that some younger generations don't know where it originates from, but that's because before Siege, there had not been another one since Vegas 2. After while, the series escaped from the public conscious. Not helping was the cancelled Patriots, and Siege having a super rough start.
 
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Dalisclock

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B. Jordan is a big fan of the Rainbow Six games. He's made that clear in interviews.

Most people know what Rainbow Six is, even if they've never read the books. I do admit that some younger generations don't know where it originates from, but that's because before Siege, there had not been another one since Vegas 2. After while, the series escaped from the public conscious. Not helping was the cancelled Patriots, and Siege having a super rough start.
Good point. I'm one of those weirdos who read the book(because I was still a clancy fan at the time) and played the game and never played another Rainbow 6 game after that. I own Vegas somewhere and have never even touched it. So I'm thinking of it from that perspective, even though I know it's gotten a lot more popular then that in the past few decades, even if nobody really remembers what it started out as.

Now I feel old. GET OFF MY LAWN WITH YOUR POKE MANS AND YOUR JAZZ MUSIC!
 
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Xprimentyl

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Good point. I'm one of those weirdos who read the book(because I was still a clancy fan at the time) and played the game
Are you talking about the 1998 videogame on PC? If so, I LOVED that game. I was absolute garbage at it, but I loved trying. I'd spend an hour white-boarding the perfect strategy and effectively hit "play" to watch my AI squad try to pull it off. It was certainly a unique game, not for everyone, but I was quite disappointed when future Rainbow 6 games turned into run-of-the-mill FPS games. Other than that very first game, I played Vegas, but haven't been interested in any R6 since.
 

Dalisclock

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Are you talking about the 1998 videogame on PC? If so, I LOVED that game. I was absolute garbage at it, but I loved trying. I'd spend an hour white-boarding the perfect strategy and effectively hit "play" to watch my AI squad try to pull it off. It was certainly a unique game, not for everyone, but I was quite disappointed when future Rainbow 6 games turned into run-of-the-mill FPS games. Other than that very first game, I played Vegas, but haven't been interested in any R6 since.
Exactly that. My big issue was that the AI of your squaddies wasn't great so they could watch the dude in front of them get taken down and they'd make no attempt to evade or change tactics at all to prevent also getting shot. So your little squad of 3-4 guys could run into a trap and all get mowed down in a line like 4 turkeys getting headshotted in a row.

But the concept was wonderful. Planning out the entire assault, setting everyone up, hitting the start button and watching all the gears start turning at once.No drama or nonsense in the briefings, just "This is your job, this is the layout of the place to the best of our knowledge, pick your guys and try to make it work"

I heard some of the early sequels were actually pretty good. Basically just refinements on the original concept but new scenarios and such. I think I picked up R6 Three on Steam but haven't played it yet.
 
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