Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Jul 18, 2009
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Which is why I hate it and will never watch it. It features a bunch of retcons that weren't necessary, and just raises further questions. In good conscience can't watch the movie, because the director let a personal friend of his on the set, and said friend is a sexual offender. So they can both fuck off. Not worth the watch, no matter how many cool points it has in the beginning.
Oh no I wasn't talking about The Predator (haven't even seen that one, and never will), I meant the Predator creature itself being cool, but that it really shouldn't be expanded on much if at all.
 
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gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
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May 13, 2009
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I got to see the new Predator movie on Hulu+ and it gets a solid B from me.

The Predator's retro 1700s design is a lot of fun. His weapons are retro as well. The scenery is gorgeous. I didn't find any of the characters annoying. They convincingly pull off having a 100 lb girl fight this thing with stone age tools rather than a 50 cal. Gatling gun.

Lots of imaginative gore without ever feeling like horror porn.

Worth a watch.

 

Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Feb 9, 2012
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Paddleton

Two friends (Ray Romano and Mark Duplass) coming to terms with mortality when one of them gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. This probably varies from state to state but in the case of Duplass' character he's eligible for assisted suicide, so a large part of the movie is the road trip to get them pills.

Romano's character is clearly on the spectrum, which I think encourages the movie to keep things as un-melodramatic as possible. Both of them have a very casual, uncomplicated life (they're basically misfits and form their own social co-dependent circle) and it really feels as heartbreaking to see Duplass coming to terms with his own death as much as it is to imagine Romano having to go on living without him.

I really liked this movie. It's simple, direct, uncompromising, manages to hit 'bittersweet comedy' without belittling the subject matter or going for cheap emotion.
 
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gorfias

Unrealistic but happy
Legacy
May 13, 2009
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Paddleton

Two friends (Ray Romano and Mark Duplass) coming to terms with mortality when one of them gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. This probably varies from state to state but in the case of Duplass' character he's eligible for assisted suicide, so a large part of the movie is the road trip to get them pills.

Romano's character is clearly on the spectrum, which I think encourages the movie to keep things as un-melodramatic as possible. Both of them have a very casual, uncomplicated life (they're basically misfits and form their own social co-dependent circle) and it really feels as heartbreaking to see Duplass coming to terms with his own death as much as it is to imagine Romano having to go on living without him.

I really liked this movie. It's simple, direct, uncompromising, manages to hit 'bittersweet comedy' without belittling the subject matter or going for cheap emotion.
Looks interesting. Hope to check it out on Netflix ASAP.
 

Xprimentyl

Made you look...
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Aug 13, 2011
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They Grey: Good / Great

A plane carrying a group of oil riggers crashes somewhere in Alaska, and the few survivors find themselves hunted by a very malicious pack of wolves. Ostensible wolf expert Liam Neeson becomes the de facto leader as they try to hike their way through the bitter cold and stalking wolves to safety.

What a depressing movie. It's literally a series of down notes. Every moment of levity where the survivors are trying to stay positive is clipped short by the howling of the wolves in the not-so-distance. And it's gruesome; no punches were pulled during the making of this film. BUT, it is good insofar as it keeps you engaged and your asshole puckered.
 
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Piscian

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Apr 28, 2020
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They Grey: Good / Great

A plane carrying a group of oil riggers crashes somewhere in Alaska, and the few survivors find themselves hunted by a very malicious pack of wolves. Ostensible wolf expert Liam Neeson becomes the de facto leader as they try to hike their way through the bitter cold and stalking wolves to safety.

What a depressing movie. It's literally a series of down notes. Every moment of levity where the survivors are trying to stay positive is clipped short by the howling of the wolves in the not-so-distance. And it's gruesome; no punches were pulled during the making of this film. BUT, it is good insofar as it keeps you engaged and your asshole puckered.
The Grey has a sort of extra undertone to it because Liam Neesons irl wife died shortly before they started the project so a lot of the themes around grief were affected by it.
 

Piscian

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Oof, that's all this film needed, another reason to be depressing.
Yeah it was abrupt too, skiing accident or something. according to the wiki the director had him write the letter in the film as a way to channel his grief.

I thought it was a great movie, but not one Ive ever watched twice. snow, self loathing, wolf fights, /end. I feel the same way about "Alive (1993)". Its just like "yup that was really sad".
 

Xprimentyl

Made you look...
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Yeah it was abrupt too, skiing accident or something. according to the wiki the director had him write the letter in the film as a way to channel his grief.
What?? That's like a kitchen boss telling the dishwasher to cry into the sink to save on water "channel his grief."

I thought it was a great movie, but not one Ive ever watched twice. snow, self loathing, wolf fights, /end. I feel the same way about "Alive (1993)". Its just like "yup that was really sad".
Same. You can add Everest to that list of "good, but too heart-wrenching to re-watch." At the end of that one, I was already depressed, only THEN did I find out it was a true story. I had binge comedies for a few hours after that one.
 

Piscian

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We saw that in our first year at high school, after having read the book for class. Not sure why, in retrospect.
Same, but it was a more recent event at the time. I think the context was that we were in that phase of English Lit where we were reading a lot of cold weather stuff, Jack London essays and what not.
 

hanselthecaretaker

My flask is half full
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Nov 18, 2010
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To be fair, the Predator in the first movie having completely hazy, red, natural vision is already pretty WTF. I mean, if this is how they see naturally, how the fuck do they get anything done without those helmets? It's technology they didn't have at one point obviously, so what was their life like before? How were they even able to develop this tech if they were practically blind? Or did some other alien race develop it and give it to them?

The Predator's cool, but as soon as you start to expand on the lore of this thing it just kinda falls apart. Hence why the best Predator movies leave the attempt at lore for what it is and just let's the creature hunt some shit.
Exactly, which is why I can agree with this list as Prey being the best film in the “series” since the original. In some ways i actually prefer it even. It strips away 90% of the bs and focused on the Hunter vs Hunted. I also liked the change in setting.

Disregarding logic gaps with how its thermal vision operates I’d say my biggest issue would be they didn’t do anything interesting with the predator’s intro. Just, ship comes into view and there stands in the foreground.

As an aside this kinda me me want to try the game, since it apparently makes a good effort to do more to fill in the logic gaps mentioned above than any of the movies-

 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Jul 18, 2009
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Exactly, which is why I can agree with this list as Prey being the best film in the “series” since the original. In some ways i actually prefer it even. It strips away 90% of the bs and focused on the Hunter vs Hunted. I also liked the change in setting.

Disregarding logic gaps with how its thermal vision operates I’d say my biggest issue would be they didn’t do anything interesting with the predator’s intro. Just, ship comes into view and there stands in the foreground.

As an aside this kinda me me want to try the game, since it apparently makes a good effort to do more to fill in the logic gaps mentioned above than any of the movies-

I actually like the intro of seeing the ship breach through the clouds, but yeah, the shot of the ship flying off with the Pred standing up in frame was boring and unnecessary.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Feb 9, 2012
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Platoon

The movie reminds me of that sequence in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen and Sam Bottoms stop the trip down river to prowl a checkpoint at nightime. There's some fighting going on but it's not very clear who's shooting who and where everyone is. Sheen asks for a CO but nobody pays him much attention - I think they even call him the CO ("You've always been the caretaker" from The Shining). There's some broken-down carnival music playing in the background and the shooting reverberates like laser fire from a sci-fi movie. It's all a senseless nightmare.

Platoon is a lot like that one scene, not because of the nightmare feel (it's very grounded in the realism of heatstroke, bugs, snakes, landmines) but because everything feels so pointless yet so dangerous. There's no one mission unifying the story like in 1917 or Saving Private Ryan, no real endgame except that each soldier is counting the days to the end of their tour. Jarhead was like that but people were mostly bored; here everyone is terrified of a sudden, pointless death. Nobody's in charge. Everyone's improvising. You never get a good look at the enemy, but the in-fighting is very clearly laid out.

I like Tom Berenger a lot in this. He's evil and straightforward about it, isn't self-deluded about it and isn't given bullshit charm to compensate for it. Willem Dafoe as the righteous hippie nemesis is great too.
 
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thebobmaster

Elite Member
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Apr 5, 2020
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Thaluikhain

Elite Member
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Jan 16, 2010
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The Golden Compass 2007

Based on the fairly dull and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is book, made into a dull and long movie that nobody liked so they didn't make the latter books in the series, instead rebooting it into a long and dull TV adaptation.

Got all the money, all the CGI, all the great actors (and also Nicole Kidman) you could want, didn't do anything with it. Meh.

Just like almost any high budget adaptation of a book series, I guess.
 

Specter Von Baren

Annoying Green Gadfly
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Aug 25, 2013
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I don't know, send help!
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Cuttlefish
Mad God

The long awaited, long in production, Magnum Opus of animator and special effects legend Phil Tippett. The term "Magnum Opus" of course, having it's origin in alchemical mysticism, which is quite appropriate, considering Mad God seems to be partly rooted in it. It's a lavishly produced stop motion picture of around 80 minutes depicting various layers of a nightmarish hellscape and many of the convoluted and incomprehensible biological, mechanical and mystical processes happening in it.

Suffice to say, this is not a movie you watch for the story. Mad God is cinema of the purely visual kind. Tippett conjures up some of the most beautifully grotesque imagery ever put to film, at the very least with this level of production value. Stop Motion Animation is often considered an artistic excess by it's very nature. Generally seen as too difficult and too expensive an animation style to be commercially viable and kept alive practically by a handful of studios doing it purely for the art. Mad God has little in common with a Laika or Aardman production, much more with, say, Gerald Scarfe's animations for The Wall or the kind of digital outsider art produced by independent animators on the internet like M Dot Strange or Jimmy Screamerclawz.

It's, frankly, one hell of a thing to commit 30 years of your life to. That's a long time to dwell in the depths of stop motion hell and Tippett makes damn sure to immerse his audience in it the best he can. A wide variety of messed up creatures are seen dwelling in a wide variety of messed up environments, industrial hellscapes, war zones, dilapidated hospitals, we see a wide variety of horrific places and things that happen in them.

It's difficult to talk about what the substance of Mad God is, exactly, beyond its imagery alone. We start of with the image of the Tower of Babel and a quote from the bible and those spiritual musings seem to be at the center of Mad God. It would seem like Mad God is trying to depict a world devoid of divine grace, a place where darkness, death, violence and heresy rule. Despite it's utter desolation, though, it's also quite vibrant in its own way, full of life and creation, bizarre and diseased as it may seem to us. There are two sequences of events in Mad God that one could perhaps describe as plotlines. One involves mass produced soldiers trying to detonate an explosive under the order of what seems to be an elderly mage with claws on his hands and feet and another one which involves a worm like infant being carried from a hospital to the laboratory of an alchemist. The latter of which probably has the clearest structure and payoff to it.

I suppose at the end of the day, there are two ways to look at Mad God. One is taking it literally as a work of surrealist fantasy that is applicable, but not directly allegorical to any material reality. The other one, of course, is to read it as an allegory and look for a concrete metaphor behind every single one of its individual elements. Everyone has their own viewpoint when it comes to this, but straight up, I was never a big fan of the latter approach. I think there is little value to a film that can't, at least to some extent, be taken literally and only presents itself as a text to be decoded and translated, and I think Mad God is imbued with too much passion, emotion and creativity to be just that.

I'm unable to say what Tippett's intentions were but I can say quite confidently that he created something wholly unique and beautiful with Mad God. There are plently of clear influences, with some direct references to paintings of Hieronymous Bosch or Zdzisław Beksiński or films like David Lynch's Eraserhead or Henry Sellick's Nightmare Before Christmas. But at the center of it is a phantastical and phantasmagorical journey into a world that got to grow and gestate inside Phillipp Tippett's mind for multiple decades. If anything, it would be a dissapointment if it were easy to relate to.

Mad God is a thoroughly immersive, stylistically unique and textually ambitious descent into one of the most beautiful wastelands ever put to film. A visceral place of manifold textures, sounds and processes of byzantine complexity. A movie asking to be experienced and contemplated, more so than interpreted. It's an acquired taste, but a very rich and unusual one.
I suppose I'll have to buy a subscription. Looks interesting and like something I'd enjoy seeing in my current mindset.
 

Old_Hunter_77

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Dec 29, 2021
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I got to see the new Predator movie on Hulu+ and it gets a solid B from me.

The Predator's retro 1700s design is a lot of fun. His weapons are retro as well. The scenery is gorgeous. I didn't find any of the characters annoying. They convincingly pull off having a 100 lb girl fight this thing with stone age tools rather than a 50 cal. Gatling gun.

Lots of imaginative gore without ever feeling like horror porn.

Worth a watch.
Watched this last night. I agree with you 100% but it was precisely what I was looking- a nice little action flick on a Friday night after a brutal work week before I start another season of some other show.
I had already seen this actress pull off action and fighting sequences in Legion so I was down for this whole thing.
I think I also benefitted from never having seen any of the other movies in the "series" (my friends and I just watched the original with Arnie 100 times back in the day). I'm glad I don't know about any of the crap they piled into what is the simplest of premises and the only two movies with a predator alien I watched were literally the same exact plot and rhythm.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
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Watched this last night. I agree with you 100% but it was precisely what I was looking- a nice little action flick on a Friday night after a brutal work week before I start another season of some other show.
I had already seen this actress pull off action and fighting sequences in Legion so I was down for this whole thing.
I think I also benefitted from never having seen any of the other movies in the "series" (my friends and I just watched the original with Arnie 100 times back in the day). I'm glad I don't know about any of the crap they piled into what is the simplest of premises and the only two movies with a predator alien I watched were literally the same exact plot and rhythm.
I highly recommend you see Predator 2, if you're picking only one of the sequels. The movie does its own thing, and Danny Glover (Roger Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon) as a great leading role. P2 actually builds off the first movie well, and you can't go wrong with Gary Busey being his mad, obsessed, self. Predators is great as well. After that, ignore the rest.
 
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