Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Piscian

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Apr 28, 2020
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Green Snake

Well this is a first for me. I shut it off after 5 minutes. This is the sequel to White Snake which was lauded as realistically the first Chinese animated blockbuster that was actually good. I enjoyed the first movie and figured I'd check out the second. I'm not gonna lie Im not a fan of the direction that Chinese culture and it's government have been taking in it's drive towards isolating and siloing it's people, but I try not to be biased. In the first 5 minutes of the film the sisters battle a Buddhist monk who is apparently evil. Uuum fuck off. If it wasnt China I'd see where this goes, but I've heard this propaganda shit before. No thanks. Why do you need to be like this China? Can you not keep your bullshit off screen for 5 whole minutes?
 

Dwarvenhobble

Is on the Gin
May 26, 2020
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The Suicide Squad
(Own copy)
Rating: Good enough, but not great.

Very quick summary review: For better or worse this is James Gunn let fully loose without anyone checking his work or telling him "Ok enough Troma edgy stuff for today for you"

Longer Ramble:

I'm one of the few people who will stick up for David Ayer's Suicide Squad film, both the theatrical and the extended cuts work but eaching having their own flaws. What James Gunn delivered in his version of Suicide Squad was better but in the true style of DC films for better or for worse the film very much feels like the vision and creation of a specific director. In this case we get James Gunn doing a light Troma film for DC which while it definitely delivers more on the idea of deaths in Taskforce X and how dangerous it is it also really felt like it was going past the hot topic level of edgy of David Ayer's film into some kind of old school Troma sensibilities with buckets of gore such that this was almost akin many a modern blood splattered horror film. This felt edgy in a way that felt like Gunn was really forcing it because really do we fucking have to fucking say a fucking shitting bastard twat cutting swear fucking arse bloody pissing word every 2 second? Like I wouldn't normally object to swearing but come on it's best use sparingly for effect not so often it's almost punctuation. Hell in parts this film just felt somewhat mean spirited but also went off with a weird sort of running joke tangent about Polka-dot man's mother and that joke just did not work and needed some more development and explanation to it somehow. From an artistic perspective Gunn does deliver some more stunning shots and visually appealing stuff than Ayer did though that comes back more to the different filmography of each and their styles.

What Gunn delivers was a swing at nailing the feel of Suicide Squad's comics and missing the mark somewhat. Yes he delivered a technically better film but I'd actually maintain Ayer's film was closer to capturing the feel of new 52 Suicide Squad while Gunn's version felt more like Gunn just being let loose to play in DC's toybox. It might just be that making a Suicide Squad film just isn't the way to go with the material as it really would have to choose between mass appeal and trying to capture that specific and often not that appealing tone of many of the comics.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Feb 9, 2012
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Nobody

Adequate John Wick-esque action vehicle for Bob Odenkirk, a dull suburban everyman who's secretly a badass and goes on a rampage after a break-in that shames him in front of his family. Written by the John Wick guy and directed by the Hardcore Henry guy, you get the picture.

Could've used a bit more emotional drive than just being a wish-fulfilment fantasy. Bob's rampage seems more motivated by boredom than genuine outrage, and once he shakes off the dust everything pretty much always goes his way, so the stakes never feel all that high. But hey, it's under 90 minutes and has Christopher Lloyd dual-wielding shotguns. I've seen worse.
 

Xprimentyl

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Awake (2007): Fuck / Great

Clay (Hayden Christensen) plays a young billionaire with a heart condition requiring a transplant. Beholden to his mother and the legacy of his deceased father, he finds himself hiding a relationship with Sam (Jessica Alba) while weighing his inevitably short future. Dr. Harper (Terrence Howard,) a surgeon and dear friend who wants to do the transplant procedure for him, convinces him that life, particularly his life, is short and he mustn't live his few years in the shadows of his family. Circumstances find him in the perfect position for an immediate transplant, and in the operating room he is anesthetized... except he's still awake and can feel everything.

I've said it before, I'm very squeamish when it comes to body horror, and this movie was basically unwatchable for the second 3rd of it. I literally could not watch as they cut him open and his inner voice screamed in the kind of agony I can only imagine in nightmares.

Other than that, it's pretty good. I don't want to say much else, because it's easy to spoil. I recommend it to anyone who can stomach it.
 

Hawki

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Mar 4, 2014
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Toy Story 3 (8/10)

Similar to TS1, I won't comment much on this, since everyone knows the plot of this movie, and I doubt I could say much that hasn't been said already. I guess the only thing worth noting is that like TS1, the finale is an escape sequence of sorts, again orchestrated by Woody, but with all the toys having a role. So, in TS1, he can make a plan to rescue Buzz in the space of a few minutes. Here, he has a day to plan an escape, and it mostly works. I guess years of running staff meetings gave Woody superior planning skills?

Anyway, it's good. It's kind of slipped down a bit in my estimation though - watching it now, the theme of Andy moving on and the toys themselves finding a new place for themselves are kind of secondary to the larger plot. Also, I'd argue that Lotso's henchmen turn on him far too quickly. Woody procures the Daisy tag for "Baby," like it's some kind of proof, when Baby saw Lotso throw it away ages ago, but that's what sends Baby over the edge? There's no indication that Lotso's toys are actually discontent with the system, and TBH, I don't think Lotso's arrangement is that unfair, TBH. Not justifying the toys in cages thing, but new toys having the 'hard hitting children' before moving up to better circumstances? Not the worst thing in the world.

Still, minor points. At the end of the day, the film's still good.
 

Bob_McMillan

Elite Member
Aug 28, 2014
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Dune, on a picnic with my SO.

Honestly a lot of the sound and visuals were probably lost on me given that we watching it in a public park, but what I could see/hear was pretty damn great. I'm kinda disappointed that I don't have much to say about this movie. It felt like a really good first episode of a TV show. If I had watched it all in one sitting at a theater, I might have been a little annoyed. Looking forward to the sequel. I should also really get a hard copy of the book.

Also, two little things: I couldn't help but giggle whenever someone said "desert power", or when they would chant "ATREIDES".
 

Ezekiel

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May 29, 2007
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Drive (1997)

[IMG]


Entertaining buddy action movie with inventive fights. Story is silly, but it doesn't matter. I've never seen Mark Dacascos in anything before, even though he's charismatic. Probably didn't become very known because his violence wasn't on the safer side, like Jackie Chan's. He shoots people when he can, and the Kadeem Hardison character saws off someone's hand.
 
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thebobmaster

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Just watched Stitches, a 2012 Irish horror-comedy about a clown who was killed during a party, and has come back 6 years later for revenge. It was quite entertaining. It was obvious at some points that the budget wasn't exactly the highest when it came to special effects, and the acting was generally about what you'd expect in a horror movie. However, the clown as portrayed by Ross Noble was actually pretty good, the humor hit FAR more often than missed (hope you don't mind puns, though), and they actually did a pretty decent job portraying how the initial death of the clown traumatized the main character for years, rather than the usual horror movie trope of having him have one or two scenes showing that he remembers/regrets it, but little more.

Overall, I'd say that if you are in the mood for a darkly comic horror film, this is pretty high up on that tier.
 
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BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
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I've never seen Mark Dacascos in anything before, even though he's charismatic. Probably didn't become very known because his violence wasn't on the safer side, like Jackie Chan's. He shoots people when he can, and the Kadeem Hardison character saws off someone's hand.
Mark did a lot of straight to VHS/DVD and TV show work. He did have a few theatrical runs, and played as Eric Draven in The Crow: Stairway to Heaven TV series. Odds are you probably seen him without realizing it. He was also on Iron Chef. Remember these?

 
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Ezekiel

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Mark did a lot of straight to VHS/DVD and TV show work. He did have a few theatrical runs, and played as Eric Draven in The Crow: Stairway to Heaven TV series. Odds are you probably seen him without realizing it. He was also on Iron Chef. Remember these?
Nope. I might have seen him in Cradle 2 the Grave, but I can't remember if I ever watched that boring movie fully. I also never watched Iron Chef and only watched the first John Wick. I just can't remember his face. I even checked my Letterboxd account before just to be sure.



I'm gonna rent Only the Strong on DVD.
 
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BrawlMan

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Nope. I might have seen him in Cradle 2 the Grave, but I can't remember if I ever watched that boring movie fully.
I liked C2TG when I was 13, but it's just meh for me now. Though I still love the cage match and final fight scene. RIP DMX. Good times.

I also never watched Iron Chef and only watched the first John Wick. I just can't remember his face. I even checked my Letterboxd account before just to be sure.
If that's the case, then you must have not seen Double Dragon (1994) either. I know this is going to sound crazy, but Double Dragon was the first movie I ever saw Mark Dacascos star in. I was 4 years old at the time, so yeah. My mom rented the movie a lot from Blockbuster for me and my bro. Surprisingly, the movie came on a lot on HBO, Cinemax, and TBS. You couldn't get me to watch the entire movie in one sitting nowadays. If you want a great Double Dragon movie, just watch Van Damme's Double Impact.
 

Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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Showgirls, 2/10

This ended up being a very fascinating watch. I'd previously considered it as a candidate for bad movie night, but heard such conflicting things about it that I ultimately decided against it. Thing is, I'm still rather conflicted even after seeing it as to whether it could sustain itself as a good bad movie. I certainly was laughing very consistently for about the first 45 minutes, and then was bored to death until the last 15.

I came up with two single-sentence summations of this movie: 1. It's like the 13-year old boy from that lost SNL Game of Thrones skit wrote an entire movie. 2. Good ideas on paper, but execution botched so badly right at the starting line.

This is one of the most relentlessly lurid, grossly gratuitously sleazy movies I've ever seen. And I know you could say "duh, it's Vegas", but even in such a movie you gotta space things out. The incessant barrage of T&A is just relentless. It's constantly in your face, every minute there's a stripper on screen, or someone showing tits, or someone stripping for some other reason, and it becomes annoying at first, then just white noise in the end. Never have I wanted to shout "Move *****, get out the way, I'm trying to watch a movie here" so much at the screen. I could just hear the low grunting in the audience while watching this, and I watched it on my desktop alone at home. The endless parade of titillation was so overpowering that those sounds of people in the audience rubbing themselves through their trouser pockets transcended time and space.

This is one of those rare movies where just about every possible thing that could go wrong does go wrong. And even more bafflingly it's mostly not due to incompetence: the whole thing is just that misguided. Elizabeth Berkeley's over the top acting and physicality were apparently intended to show her having a history with drug abuse, but it comes across more like she's on drugs the whole time. Or from another more contemporary angle, she often comes across as possibly even neurodivergent, which made me feel a little guilty about laughing at her throwing food around. There are a ton of interesting angles and subject matter this film could tackle, but it butchers every single one of them with frankly astonishing efficiency:
  • the massive amount of gay subtext could be a very interesting exploration of showbusiness in Vegas, and how such an already extravagant place would end up attracting people who go against the grain. In a place where everybody's a coked-out sleazebag social conventions around sexuality would understandably be more lenient. But all it ends up amounting to is "Phwoaarr, it's hot when chicks make out"
  • The attempt to express character development, shifting power dynamics and relationships through the numerous dance sequences is admirable, but they're shot in a way that never conveys anything other than "Phwooaarrr, tits"
  • Speaking of, there's clearly a ton of effort and coordination put into the dance numbers. They're just edited in a way where you can't focus on anything, and all that effort goes to complete waste. It just ends up as more T&A on the pile
  • Apparently some people say this film is supposed to be a satire, but that just feels like a stillborn idea: how do you make a movie about Vegas, the most over the top, dumbest and least subtle place on earth, in a genre that specifically calls for being smart, subtle and/or over the top? Apparently Verhoeven interviewed real life strippers and showgirls and used their actual words as dialogue in this movie. But that just completely caps the satire angle in the head, because you're not satirizing Vegas; you're merely recreating it
  • Even the cautionary tale angle is botched superbly: are we seriously supposed to think that Molly, the moral backbone of the story who's worked for years as a seamstress behind the scenes and has to have seen the sleazy side of Vegas, still thinks the rockstar she's hot for is some knight in shining armor? How is Nomi, who we find out already had a history of drug use and prostitution prior to the movie's events, still supposed to think Vegas is some sort of dream come true for her? It honestly goes beyond stupidity into outright denial of reality
I could go on, but I need to go to sleep. The one decent thing about this movie is Kyle MacLachlan, who plays a sleazily charming scumbag really entertainingly. All the rest are things I can appreciate, but not really enjoy. For example, Berkeley's athleticism and commitment to the role is undeniable, she gives it her all in every scene. It's just that we didn't need her all in every scene. There's a shitton of production value on display, but it's all shiny surface built on a foundation of wet cardboard and spoiled fish. It's not so much an endless barrage of shit like, say, Suicide Squad. But the fact that I can see so much potential in it makes it infinitely more frustrating. Awful
 
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SckizoBoy

Ineptly Chaotic
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Jan 6, 2011
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A Hermit's Cave
Blade Runner 2049 - colour me underwhelmed...

It felt slow and it was slow, much more than it really needed to be and the plot felt so insubstantial given it didn't really address anything except the character-macguffin and even that's resolution felt insufficient with no real input from the story's big bad. It felt like it was setting up a sequel since nothing happens either to or with Wallace, and the lead in towards the finale felt really undercooked as another supposedly large feature of the film went unexplored, just dumped in the viewer's lap with a shrug on everyone's part. Best thing about the film was Dave Bautista.
 

Xprimentyl

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The Unforgiveable: Gut-wrenching / Great

Sandra Bullock plays a woman recently released from prison after serving 20 years for murdering a police officer. Clearly disaffected with the remnants of the life she's forced to live now, she holds desperately to the hope of reconnecting with her little sister whom she'd raised and was only 5-years-old when she went to prison despite the court's no-contact order. We learn that her sister went into foster care and is presently a young women prospering with her adoptive family, but suffering from fractured, PTSD-like memories of Bullock whom she doesn't remember.

Very touching and raw performance from Bullock; you feel her pain every step of the way. I really do recommend this one, and if you're not teared up by the end, check you trashcan for your soul, you monster.

The Power of the Dog: Decent / Great

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil, a ranch hand who runs a ranch with his brother George. George takes a liking to and weds a widowed woman named Rose (Kirsten Dunst,) and for reasons unknown, Phil takes an immediate disliking to Rose and her teenaged son Peter, the latter of which he deems to be the antithesis to manliness given his penchant for introversion and dressing properly and prim. Phil antagonizes in subtle and little ways creating a very hostile environment them both. Rose takes to the drink while Peter seems more stoic and tries not to let on that he's affected. After Phil learns that Peter has potentially discovered his dark secret, he takes Peter under his wing and tries to mentor him into manliness.

Really a slow-boil film, but a good one in the end. The reveal is harsh, but satisfying.

Pig: Really Good / Great

Nicholas Cage plays Robin, a man living effectively in reclusion in the woods in Oregon. With his foraging pig, he searches for truffles and sells them to high-end restaurants via an ostensibly wealthy entrepreneur, Amir, who comes to his cabin every Thursday to collect the find. One night, unknown persons break into Robin's remote cabin, beat him unconscious, and steal his pig. Using Amir's resources (mainly his car,) Robin goes into the city proper to find his pig.

Surprisingly good. I was not expecting to enjoy a movie with such an odd foundation to work as well as it did. Worth the watch.
 
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Chimpzy

Simian Abomination
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Pig: Really Good / Great

Nicholas Cage plays Robin, a man living effectively in reclusion in the woods in Oregon. With his foraging pig, he searches for truffles and sells them to high-end restaurants via an ostensibly wealthy entrepreneur, Amir, who comes to his cabin every Thursday to collect the find. One night, unknown persons break into Robin's remote cabin, beat him unconscious, and steal his pig. Using Amir's resources (mainly his car,) Robin goes into the city proper to find his pig.

Surprisingly good. I was not expecting to enjoy a movie with such an odd foundation to work as well as it did. Worth the watch.
Unexpected is probably the best way to describe Pig, yes.

Fyi, for anyone interested, from Exprimentyl's synopsys you might think it a revenge flick à la John Wick, or Taken, or such. It's very much not. But very worth it anyway.
 
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Xprimentyl

Made you look...
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Encounter: Good / Great

Malik (played by Riz Ahmed) is a marine on a mission to extract his two young sons to safety during an outbreak of an extraterrestrial parasite that's presumptively assumed over half the population.

That's all I can really say without spoiling the ride, but it is a good movie. Well acted and highly intense at moments. Recommend.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Mar 3, 2009
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The Sand (2015)

My wife went out for the evening, so it's another trashy horror movie for me. This is a low budget monster B-movie about the usual teen types in peril, this time after an all night beach party. They wake up bleary-eyed in the morning, and then it turns out there is something carnivorous in the sand. It makes sparing use of SFX - just as well because when it arrives it's incredibly awful pixelly CGI, so they clearly had almost no money to spend on it. And let's face it, it's not good. However, it's got enough redeeming features, with some charm and tension, to save it.
 
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Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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Die Hard, 10/10

Got the chance to see this in theaters, which I immediately jumped at. And yep, holds up like a diamond. Like 99% of it feels utterly timeless, and not dated one single bit. It's got fantastic pacing, a really tight script, one of the best action protagonists ever and not one moment of it feels wasted. I especially appreciated the sense of escalation the movie goes through: it starts out as an office building and John McClane as a dude in pants and a wifebeater, and by the end McClane resembles a torture victim walking amidst a blasted hellscape, right down to the omnipresent red light and fire. The slightly parodic, tongue in cheek tone goes a long way to keep the movie from feeling dated. One of the best bits in the movie is when Hans Gruber lists some political prisoners he read about in Time magazine to pretend he's some sort of political actor. In fact the assumption of the robbers being terrorists might actually feel more timely now than it did back in '88. I haven't seen any of the sequels, but it really is remarkable just how vulnerable and human they make McClane, only surviving by the skin of his teeth and quick wits. To this day he feels very refreshing and unique when it comes to action movie protagonists.

There is, however, one plot element that hits very, very differently in 2021 and that's Al, the cop who's called in to check on the Nakatomi building. I can't even imagine the reaction people would have to trying to make the audience sympathize with a cop who admits to shooting a kid and calling it a "mistake" in 2021. It's a good thing they made him a chubby black guy, because any other would come across as even less sympathetic.
 
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