Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
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May 13, 2009
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Hard to believe how spoiled we all were to think that Ironman 3 was only meh. Now we are exposed to far lesser fair like Shang Chi that failed, IMHO to make me think much of the main character while there was so much to love in Ironman 3, including a very balsy main character. Writer Director Shane Black gave us far more than we deserved. 85/100
 

McElroy

Elite Member
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Apr 3, 2013
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Finland
Dune

Do you like sand? It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. The characters all behave so physically yet formally (it's the polar opposite of how us Finns behave: informal and non-physical) and it's all a bit crazy and off in other ways. Hans Zimmer's music is too loud in the theater. Other sounds are alright and so are most of the visuals, though I wish there were some longer shots too.

Now of course showing and not telling must be balanced with some exposition in sci-fi, and it is really well done in Dune. The main characters are all very good too and Zendaya thankfully only has a few lines. All in all it is not as heavy to watch as Blade Runner 2049, because we do get some adventure movie vibes, some dramatic moments are purposefully diminished, and of course it's not set in a dystopia. A LOT of Arrival vibes, however. 8/10, because the overly loud music shaves off a point.
 
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Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Jul 18, 2009
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Watched Labyrinth for the first time. It's probably one of the most plotless movies I've ever seen. Awesome puppetry and set design though.
Most 80's kids movies while iconic aren't that great plotwise. I don't think it was till the Disney renaissance that things started to pick up a bit.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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but I feel like a certain group of those people have spent so long telling themselves Dario Argento is a genius (despite him shitting out films like Dracula 3D and Mother of Tears)
Well, to be fair, almost every director has their turkeys. But you are right that Argento is overrated. There are certain things he had a certain style and flair for, but his shortcomings always left the final product a little underwhelming in my view.

Likewise I quite enjoyed the remake, but maybe not as much as you did.
 

Bob_McMillan

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Kate - Another female John Wick movie that doesn't quite get to those heights but is still pretty good.

Very visceral and well choreographed, with some cool shots and believable stunts. Mary Elizabeth Winstead really makes you wonder why the fuck we've been casting the likes of ScarJo and Gadot for the biggest female-led action movies of the past decade. She also looks twice as old as she did in Birds of Prey, which is kinda scary.

But yeah, not everything is great. I already knew the whole plot from the first 3 minutes of the movie. The child actress they got isn't bad, but has very little to do and whoever wrote her dialogue must not have interacted with a teenager in years. The Japan setting was fun, but the Yakuza and how they're glorified feel really played out at this point.

Oh, and there was a car chase that looked so bad, you could snip it out of the movie and put it into Tokyo Drift and no one would notice.

Worth a watch if you just want to chill.
 
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09philj

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The Day Shall Come

Chris Morris's previous film Four Lions was about people who weren't cut out to be terrorists attempting to commit a terrorist attack. The Day Shall Come is about a small black cult who aren't terrorists at all trying to be entrapped into doing some terrorism by the FBI so they can be arrested. However, the FBI underestimate how determined the cult's leader Moses is not to become a terrorist and hilarity ensues. It's not as out and out funny as Four Lions but this is a solid satire of how the FBI chases arrests that don't actually make America safe.
 
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Ezekiel

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Lars von Trier's Melancholia. With Charlotte Gainsbourg again, and Kirten Dunst. I've watched a few of Gainsbourg's movies the last month, dating back to when she was thirteen or fourteen.

This is a great movie. About inevitable destruction and how two sisters deal with it. (Also part of the reason Majora's Mask is one of my favorite Nintendo games ever. I wish they explored darker material in their kid-friendly games still.) Kirsten Dunst plays the depressive one who embraces it. Charlotte Gainsbourg's character is the more hopeful one who can't. Both played very well. First we get to know their characters in an hour long wedding reception and some eerie nightmare visuals. I've long wondered what an event like this would be like. It made me think of some things I hadn't considered. I did watch my other rental, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, after to lighten my mood.
 
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BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
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Now we are exposed to far lesser fair like Shang Chi that failed
Failed at what? I get not liking it, but the movie is no failure. Only to your specific expectations. I love Shang-Chi, and I am not ashamed.



With that said, Iron Man 3 I found a B+ movie. The 3rd entry got way too much from the hardcore Marvel Comics fans (not specifically the MCU only fans) and on the Internet. Certainly better than Iron Man 2. Shane Black is known for the Lethal Weapon movies, so he usually knows how to old-school style action films and applies what to modern films.
 
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BrawlMan

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Kate - Another female John Wick movie that doesn't quite get to those heights but is still pretty good.
Seriously, how many more Wick clones are we gonna get at this point? I like old-school style action or action that is of the non-shaky variety, but get your own material people!
 

Dwarvenhobble

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May 26, 2020
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Gun Akimbo:
(AKA that film where Daniel Radcliffe from Harry Potter runs round with guns bolted to his hands)

Rating: Ok and watchable enough

I can best describe the film as some-one looking at the film Last Action Hero and going "Lets do that idea but also lets do kind of a n anti version of the film Nerve". It's a hugely nihilistic film misanthropic film that seems to want to say a lot but probably should have had a few re-write to make at least one of it's ideas more of a core theme in the film.

So Daniel Radcliff plays Miles a video game developer at a massive corporation working on a shitty exploitative free to play game rather than anything creative. He's still not over his ex Nova a Tattoo artist who aspires to be a comic artist and writer. He spends his free time basically being a "White Knight" or "Fighting bad trolls online" while getting drunk. Eventually he finds the underground fight to the death show called Skizm which pits criminals against one another online for the public amusement with the fight playing out throughout the city with the resident reigning female champion Nix a mental patient whose recently escaped from hospital.

While trolling the bad trolls on the skizm livestream chat Miles pisses enough people off to get noticed and ends up pissing off some of the people behind Skizm who decide to teach him a lesson by making him the next contestant to take on Nix.

Not to spoil to much but there's more to Nix's story and why she was in a mental hospital, and Miles has to find a way to survive and potentially turn the game round on those running it.

What the film seems to want to say theme wise but couldn't figure out what it wanted as a core theme:

  • Most of the cool action chicks people would love would be barely functional borderline psychopaths in reality and are only badass due to people confusing their serious mental trauma for toughness
  • Humanity is terrible, it's a film about people watching and making commentary video on a live death sport game basically.
  • All the good competent cops will end up getting betrayed
  • "White Knight" trolls fighting "The bad guys" by trying to piss them off online need to 'man up' because they're just the same and just as sad as the "awful trolls" they claim to fight. Shown by a sequence where Miles despite being Vegan has to eat an animal meat hotdog.
  • It isn't like in the movies - best exemplified by a line near the end "Your ex seeing you pistol whip some-one to death doesn't give her a Lady Boner and desire to get back with you, it gives her a case of PTSD"
  • Exploitative mobile game development companies are trash often run by assholes.
The film seems kinda very confused too as it want's to seemingly condemn the violent nature of humanity and it's love of seeing violence but then the action scenes kick in and the film does Sniper Elite esc sequences where you follow a bullet from the gun into an enemies skill as blood gratuitously sprays out or a fight sequence where they literally do the Mortal Kombat Xray sequence look to show a persons bones being broken. It's kind of a real case of Ludonarrative dissonance going on

Should you watch?:

If you're after a film that kind of boils down to dumb fun and a lot of style on show in a "Yes we watched Hardcore Henry and John Wick and the Borne films and we're gonna try and outdo them" way. Sometimes this can leave fight scenes a bit incoherent as the action switches camera angles so often but also does a lot of weirdly showy camera stuff like having the camera spin as characters spin or some strange tracking shows that also pan round the characters rather than showing what they're shooting sometimes. It's fun enough but if you were looking for a film that really tries to say something then you're better off looking up the film Nerve
 

Gordon_4

The Big Engine
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Apr 3, 2020
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Hard to believe how spoiled we all were to think that Ironman 3 was only meh. Now we are exposed to far lesser fair like Shang Chi that failed, IMHO to make me think much of the main character while there was so much to love in Ironman 3, including a very balsy main character. Writer Director Shane Black gave us far more than we deserved. 85/100
Iron Man 3 robbed the world of the spectacle of Sir Ben Kingsley beating the shit out of Robert Downey Jr with magic space Kung Fu. I know who failed in this instance sir, and it wasn’t Shang Chi
 

gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
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Failed at what? I get not liking it, but the movie is no failure. Only to your specific expectations. I love Shang-Chi, and I am not ashamed.



With that said, Iron Man 3 I found a B+ movie. The 3rd entry got way too much from the hardcore Marvel Comics fans (not specifically the MCU only fans) and on the Internet. Certainly better than Iron Man 2. Shane Black is known for the Lethal Weapon movies, so he usually knows how to old-school style action films and applies what to modern films.
Iron Man 3 robbed the world of the spectacle of Sir Ben Kingsley beating the shit out of Robert Downey Jr with magic space Kung Fu. I know who failed in this instance sir, and it wasn’t Shang Chi
I felt like I was at the very tip of excitement, wanting Shang Chi to break out and be the bad ass he is in the comics. He failed to impress me (the bus scene was very, very close though). He seemed almost an afterthought in his own titular movie! He seemed to react to things, rather than assess the situation and resolutely plan his response.

And be careful what you wish for. I asked myself how this movie could differentiate itself from your run of the mill martial arts picture. In the end, the martial arts is what I liked best (that bus scene). The CGI ending bored me.

I'm sure I'll see Eternals next... hope to love it.
 

Hawki

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Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome (5/10)

Treating this as a movie, as while it was a web series originally, it's cut together as a movie on the DVD, and as far as editing, pacing, and structure goes, that's without issue. However, what IS an issue is that this really isn't that good. The visuals are lacklustre - the CGI is lacking, almost everything is using some kind of green screen or blue screen, and it shows. And that might not be a problem if other elements made up for it (see Babylon 5), but what we have here is...eh? It's simultaniously too simple, and too complicated. Too simple, because Will Adama goes through your standard hero's journey, from cockey pilot to seasoned veteran. On the other, the overall plan of uploading false data to the cylons through a mole that you know is a mole, but you're going to pretend you don't know is a mole, with mole apparently being in touch with the cylons, yet the cylons having multiple engagements that could kill their own double agent...gah.

I'd say it's worth it if you're a fan of the series, but even then, this doesn't really add anything. It's easily missible.
 

Bob_McMillan

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Aug 28, 2014
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Seriously, how many more Wick clones are we gonna get at this point? I like old-school style action or action that is of the non-shaky variety, but get your own material people!
Yeah honestly I wouldn't mind less grounded action movies now. I guess that's what the MCU is good for.
 
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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Jan 30, 2011
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Dune

New adaptation of Frank Herbert's science-fiction novel Dune, which has had a few of them already. Famously, one of the first people attached to it was Hollywood's very own witch doctor Alejandro Jodorowsky, with a rather overambitious take on it. An actually finished version was directed by David Lynch and stands as one of histories biggest studio hackjobs. There was a miniseries, at some point, I think, and now quebecois wunderkind Denis Villeneuve got to release his take on the material.

Villeneuve made a name for himself as a SciFi director with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. You know, I rewatched BR49 very recently and came to the conclusion that it doesn't hold up as well as I remember it. While the production values are excellent, it seems like a much colder, much more sterile and emotionally empty movie than Ridley Scott's original. I mention this because I have some of the same problems with Dune. So, what it's about? There is a desert planet named Arakis on which a material named Spice can be found. Spice is both a drug and a material necessary for interstellar travel . Arakis belongs to the powerful Harkonnen dynasty, but, in a political move by the galactic emperor, is given to the Atreides dynasty, its youngest son Paul being our viewpoint character, a melancholy aristocratic prettyboy.

Dune deals with the escalating conflict between the Atreides and Harkonnens and Paul eventually having to flee the capital to live with the planets natives, a nomadic people called the Fremen, eventually becoming something a bit like a futuristic Lawrence of Arabia, though the movies doesn't get that far.

Here's something you might not have been aware of: Dune (2021) doesn't actually cover the entire book. While the movie itself gets the fact that it's a Part 1 out of the way fairly quickly, the marketing seems to deliberately omit that fact, which left me rather dissapointed right away. The movie gets just about to the novels halfway point before rolling its credits, but overall adapts it fairly well. It glosses over a lot of backstory but trying to fit it in past the point it's necessary to follow the plot would have been excessive, considering it has quite a lot of exposition as it is.

Somewhere inside Dune, the novel, there's a relatively straight forward Heroes Journey, that you'd think would lend itself to a movie adaptation, but it's decorated with generous helpings of spirituality and space opera weirdness that are by nature a bit of a hard sell. With Lynch's version from the 80s I always got the impression that Lynch didn't take the material especially seriously. Villeneuve does. Boy, does he ever. He adapts Dune with the leaden self importance of a war drama. The colors are muted, the score is heavy and pounding, practically every actor plays their role with stone faced seriousness and almost every aspect of its visual design appears to go out of its way to avoid anything that could be considered too whimsical. While the film follows the books plot just fine, I'm not sure it really captures its spirit. Mind you, I haven't read it since I was a teenager but this adaptation struck me as weirdly sterile.

While Dune is certainly a visually impressive work, a lot of it felt a bit sterile to me. Almost all of its locations feel very sparse and empty, even those that are supposed to express wealth and power. Most of Dune is set in mostly empty rooms with murky lighting. Even a lot of the spaceships look like brutalist architecture that somehow learned to fly. Dune is at its most impressive in its depiction of futuristic warfare, its what its gritty visual style actually seems to be best suited for. The violence is intense and feels grounded, even when the technology on display is rather fantastical. It expands on what Star Wars: Rogue One only managed to hint at.

Dune has quite the all star cast, though it's a movie that feels a lot more concerned with places and events than characters which means that hardly any of them manage to really stick out. My personal favorite was probably Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Harkonnen. Skarsgard brings a very menacing aura to a character whose defining personality traits are gluttony and cruelty and reminded me rather of an old Marlon Brando.

Dune is an impressive piece of film making on a technical level, but a lot of it fell a bit flat for me. Most of it for the same reasons Blade Runner 2049 fell a bit flat for me and considering that is a widely beloved movie I imagine Dune will end up that way too. It does its best to turn a classic novel into a work of shakespearian drama and by god, does Villeneuve want you to know that he's taking this story seriously. It pays off in some regards but hurt the movie for me in others. It lacked a sense of wonder for me, it didn't draw me into this world because, frankly it made that world look lifeless and dreary, even past the point that it made sense for the setting.
 

BrawlMan

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Yeah honestly I wouldn't mind less grounded action movies now. I guess that's what the MCU is good for.
If you ever get the chance, look up action movies that feature Scott Adkins as main lead. He does mostly old school style martial arts movies. Here's a list: Ninja, Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear, Close Range, Hard Target 2, and The Accident Man. They'll keep you busy for a while.
 
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BrawlMan

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I felt like I was at the very tip of excitement, wanting Shang Chi to break out and be the bad ass he is in the comics. He failed to impress me (the bus scene was very, very close though). He seemed almost an afterthought in his own titular movie! He seemed to react to things, rather than assess the situation and resolutely plan his response.

And be careful what you wish for. I asked myself how this movie could differentiate itself from your run of the mill martial arts picture. In the end, the martial arts is what I liked best (that bus scene). The CGI ending bored me.
I disagree with you big time, but that's your own personal problem you'll have to deal with. I can't nor do I want to change your mind. I never read the comics, or any newer iterations or adpations of the character, but, I don't care. Not every comic book movie has to bat for 1000% accuracy. The movie matched my expectations and I am looking forward to what comes next.
 
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gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
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I disagree with you big time, but that's your own personal problem you'll have to deal with. I can't nor do I want to change your mind. I never read the comics, or any newer iterations or adpations of the character, but, I don't care. Not every comic book movie has to bat for 1000% accuracy. The movie matched my expectations and I am looking forward to what comes next.
I have a buddy that is very angry when anything deviates from the comics. I try to tell him, the 1st time Spiderman defeats the Sandman, he does so with a vacuum cleaner. You don't want a beat for beat adaptation of the comics.

The Dark Knight is currently my all time favorite individual movie and that Batman is NOT comic book Batman (though any time there is a new writer/artist for Batman, you could argue that is a new continuity as comic book Batman can vary wildly depending on who is handling him ie Frank Miller vs. Carmine Infantino.

But I do think there are things you need to get correct. I read of one continuity where Batman complains of having to be a detective and that isn't something he ever bargained for. I thought that's just wrong.

I thought Shang Chi in the movie was just wrong.
I worry I'll have the same reaction. I'll wait for streaming.
I've seen both the Lynch and Sci-Fi TV mini series (buddy gave me on DVD, 4x3 ratio!). And while I loved the Pink Floyd trailer, I'm thinking, OK, this story, a 3rd time, and it is only 1/2 the 1st book.
you write that this is a typical hero's journey but from the book series, that is a head fake. Paul becomes a fallen hero, with his son trying to show the people the problem with following fallible human beings. There is sooo much to this series and I have to wonder are we ever going to get there!?!? At least Sci Fi channel adapted some of the later stories to and made a mini-series, "Children of Dune" with James McAvoy from the Xmen series as Paul's son, Leto. I'll have to watch that ASAP as it has been some 30 years since I read the series.
 
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