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The Dungeonmaster- Was going through Tubi and saw this listed in their "Leaving soon" list, it sounded like a dumb, schlocky 80's fantasy film and Mrs Randalor asked to watch it with supper. We got through 20 minutes of it before Mrs Randalor told me to turn it off. It's just... bad, and not in the good sense. The film is described as "the hero goes through 7 trials directed by 7 directors" and as far as the first two "trial" segments go, either content was cut from the movie (it has a runtime under an hour and a half) or the directors had never heard of a thing called "plot". Near as we can tell, the main hero just stands around while his computer (that he's connected to... somehow? And also made into a magical Power Glove by the big bad) solves everything with lasers? The main character gets sucked into a patch of ice in the first segment, then the damsel in distress has to deal with Jack the Ripper, then the main character crawls out from the hole he originally came in from, and shouts about an ice crystal? What?
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Feb 5, 2024 15:29
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Argylle is good, not great, but it doesn't deserve the death slot it got released in and the box office flop that it's sure to become. Matthew Vaughn is still sitting himself right down in the "look if the James Bond people don't want to make bright, lighthearted globe-trotting adventures, someone loving well ought to" spot he's staked out since Kingsman, and this is his strongest effort since that movie (the sequel was a noble failure and The King's Man was just loving awful). Does the plot make any real sense if you sit down and think about it for even five minutes? No, but it's not that kind of movie, just roll with it and enjoy the next international location or elaborate fight scene. I will admit to spending a great deal of the third act distracted by the fact that Bryce Dallas Howard in a short blonde wig turns out to look a lot like Kelly Clarkson, but that's a personal problem, I think.
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Feb 6, 2024 00:23
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Argylle really just needed someone to axe like 45 minutes from it. It just felt overloaded towards the end. Nowhere near enough action setpieces to justify the runtime.
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Feb 6, 2024 02:07
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Witness for the Prosecution (1957) Been watching some of the highly regarded classics and this one was fantastic. It could easily have been hammy and camp but just manages to not go to far. Very funny in places, some fantastic performances and a great plot.
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Feb 6, 2024 11:30
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Just got home after The Iron Claw Masterpiece. I have only seen another two films that left me short of breath, Ikarie XB-1, and In The Mood For Love. Genuinely on the verge of tears since the intermission
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Feb 6, 2024 22:59
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Henry Fool Very few films leave me so unsure as to how I feel. The film is so interested in using themes to convey it's intentions, Henry being introduced as a Mephisto figure complete with Brimstone lighting for example or the intentional doubling of Henry and Simon as they effectively switch places physically while spiritually occupying opposite positions, but the film is also delights in subverting and reversing it's symbols. The film needs the same level of analysis that a great piece of literature does, not because it is as unabashedly erudite as it is scatological, but because Hartley is playing so fast and loose with his themes and symbols that you need the incisive eye of a critic to begin to unravel the jokes from the emotion and the meaningful from the meaningless. It's odd, even in films that people consider inscrutable I am left with an impression, I may not have fully grasped The Passenger on viewing but I understood the emotions it left me with. With Henry Fool I am left only with bemusement and confusion. It's a prescient work that doesn't really feel like it means anything. Paprika Millennium Actress >> Perfect Blue > Paprika > Tokyo Godfathers. That is my final ranking for now. Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 04:12
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showgirls - saw this on the shelf of a boutique rental place near me, and i'd been wondering if it's actually the misunderstood camp masterpiece people say it is, or if it's as bad as others have said it is. it's the latter. this movie sucks lol. i wrote a lot more about it on my letterboxd but i won't paste it here. it's just too cynical for its own good with nothing redeeming to latch onto while at the same time being so unserious and overly acted/poorly written that there's also nothing to latch onto. gina gershon pulls her character off but everyone else sucks. the choreography and costume design is well done, too.Gaius Marius posted:Paprika Millennium Actress >> Perfect Blue > Paprika > Tokyo Godfathers. That is my final ranking for now. seeing paprika in theaters tomorrow. haven't seen it probably since it came out and i was a kid. i basically have no recollection so it might as well be for the first time. i'm excited bc i remember it being trippy
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Feb 8, 2024 07:39
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I wonder if there's a correlation between people who enjoy Showgirls and those who grew up watching Saved By be the Bell?
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Feb 8, 2024 13:53
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Gaius Marius posted:Paprika Millennium Actress >> Perfect Blue > Paprika > Tokyo Godfathers. That is my final ranking for now. I got Tokyo Godfathers as highest for me as that’s a yearly Christmas viewing. I do owe millennium actress a rewatch so maybe that will change though. Paranoia Agent has some good stuff in it too if you haven’t seen it, though it lacks the same quality of animation.
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Feb 8, 2024 14:29
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Argylle is delightfully dumb and I don't know why it's being rated so poorly.
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Feb 8, 2024 20:01
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SirSamVimes posted:Argylle is delightfully dumb and I don't know why it's being rated so poorly. i have a movie buddy who is into movies exactly like this and i tend to hate them all. i was almost willing to agree to go see this with him but i just checked and it's loving 2h20m?? WHY? if it were 90 minutes i wouldn't mind spending time watching some silly schlock. but that runtime is egregious.
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Feb 8, 2024 21:11
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It's not even delightfully dumb, it's just very boring with some bad CGI and nonsensical plot points.
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Feb 8, 2024 21:48
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Argylle was very boring and very colorful. Honestly shocking how boring it is given that it’s obvious a lot of love and money went into it. It’s hard for me to pinpoint what makes it so boring; I think the director just really wants you to go with the flow and gives very little importance to the actual plot, but they also make all of the plot sections SO. LONG.
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Feb 9, 2024 00:45
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Thirst (1979) - An interesting take on aristocratic society as vampires. I like how the vampires are just boorish upper-class people rather than something over-the-top. Also nice how they industrialized feeding by packaging blood in cartons. I don't even really care about the satire, I just enjoyed it as a vampire movie.
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Feb 9, 2024 19:28
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Bottoms(2023):Book Smart = Heathers:Mean Girls
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Feb 10, 2024 14:46
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Lisa Frankenstein was a slow moving and annoying movie. The trailers advertised a bit of a comedy/romance/slasher. It had almost none of it. Liza Soberano and Cole Sprouse were desperately trying to help Kathryn Newton to do anything. They failed.
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Feb 11, 2024 01:03
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The Beekeeper was a really sad and tired attempt at a revenge flick with a kinda-sorta-not-quite John Wick thing going on about secret assassin groups. The action was dull, the editing was sloppy and the characters had no character. It wanted to be quippy and wink at the audience but also be serious about how lovely people who defraud the elderly are (seriously, that's the plot). It just felt like a big budget movie made entirely by amateurs trying to hit above their weight. Really wasted Jeremy Irons too.
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Feb 11, 2024 02:10
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Poor Things was the first Lanthimos I’ve seen and I’m still processing it. Absolutely loved the first half of so unreservedly, started losing it a bit when Bella went to work in a brothel (I generally find “woman pressured into sex work” narratives, especially written by men, to be kind of tired) but found the way that arc was handled to be surprisingly refreshing, and while the last bit of the movie felt a little too neat I think overall I really like it. Ruffalo plays an absolutely incredible pathetic scumbag, just an absolute little poo poo.
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Feb 11, 2024 02:44
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Now watch The Lobster
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Feb 11, 2024 03:30
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My wife and I went to see Lisa Frankenstein today. We were the only people in the theater.
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Feb 11, 2024 06:08
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Selachian posted:My wife and I went to see Lisa Frankenstein today. We were the only people in the theater. lmao, a friend of mine was talking about that in a group chat and I legit thought he was making a Poor Things joke until I got to the theater tonight and actually saw the trailer for it. Looked like poo poo honestly, how was it actually
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Feb 11, 2024 06:30
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Suicide Squad (2016): I've seen bits and pieces of this over years but never sat down to watch the whole thing in one go. This is ... actually decent? At the very least more entertaining and coherent than much of the cape flick output that followed it. The first half hour is abysmal - too much exposition, too many introductory flashbacks, every licensed track grates like a deliberate insult to the audience. Once the Midway City sequence starts rolling the movie improves dramatically. Solid performances, imagery that is both evocative and actually well rendered; you never wonder where the money went and this is maybe the last live action cape flick in recent history to not have CGI that looks interchangeable with a PS2 cutscene. The score by Steven Price is quite good, especially towards the end where it really has to sell much of the tension, which makes the decision to shoehorn as many US top 40 hits as possible into this thing even more baffling. I didn't even mind Leto-Joker showing up to carry the B-plot, he's fine here as a lethally ego -driven wildcard factor rather than the omniscient force of chaos that most recent Joker portrayals err towards. Easily the best performance from Jai Courtney in anything he's been in. The WB executive editorial influence and forced reshoots are acutely painful in that they glaringly make this movie worse while also highlighting the gap between what this could have been and what it is. Whatever you may think of Snyder's vision for the arc of DC cinematic outings, it is clear this movie was built around it and suffers for the excising of those foundational pieces. The "Darkseid glares ominously through a boom tube" easter egg was clearly meant for this movie. Should've ended on a way darker note to better sell the vibes of "unimaginable darkness and horror have now fixed their sights on a mostly defenseless world alone in the universe" but the more audience friendly conclusion was fine. I get why they reshot and recut this thing to hell because of the success of that trailer with the Bohemian Rhapsody music but still what a mess. David Ayer is right to hold a grudge over this poo poo. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Feb 11, 2024 |
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Feb 11, 2024 07:02
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The Blues Brothers seems like it really would be a lot more of a comedy high-wire act today. A couple of pasty white blues nerds doing a slapstick comedy tribute to R&B culture? Cover standards played by a cheerfully ethnically mixed band whose biggest fear at a hick country/western bar is beer bottles that get thrown even when they're being applauded? Race and racism sidelined and smiled away except with the over-the-top wink of the Illinois Nazis? It feels like there really is something to that Kelly cartoon about "America when we don't talk about race", in that today I don't think anyone would want to touch this sort of concept if simply because we all know a lot more about what cultural appropriation is and how touchy things are under the surface even when you put a happy 70s face on it. There's something winsomely naïve about how it plays and it feels like something has been lost as we've all grown up a bit, and I can grudgingly understand people who might hold this up as a prime example of how "nobody cared back in the good old days", even if only with the blaring caveat that I'd rather know an ugly truth than live a comfortable lie. Still though, what a freakin' movie. Just does not give a single drat about continuity or plausibility, just "lol let's drop that car from a helicopter 2000 feet up. Yeah I know it only just drove off a freeway ramp, gently caress you it's funny". And the sheer amount of destruction, it boggles the mind. Aykroyd must have been some kind of larger-than-life colossal figure in the industry for studios to just write him blank checks for this poo poo, even knowing he'd apparently never written a script before and wow it shows. But it sure did change the game.
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Feb 11, 2024 17:57
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American Fiction : pulls a little bit of Kaufman out of its rear end at the end but is a wonderful combo of the movie you saw in the trailers and a touching family drama you didn't. Sterling K Brown and Jeffrey Wright need to be together more often. A nice, if dated, idea that manages more laughs per minute than other satirical movies in recent history
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Feb 11, 2024 20:03
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Blade Runner 2049: Exactly as bad as I suspected it would be. Misses the point of everything it's purportedly drawing from. Fantastic, compelling performances by Gosling and Bautista. Shame about literally everything else.
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Feb 11, 2024 20:43
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Feb 11, 2024 20:53
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At this point I only have the thread bookmarked so I can read outrageously bad takes
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Feb 11, 2024 21:01
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It’s a gorgeous looking film even if you dislike it.
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Feb 11, 2024 21:03
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Sounding too
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Feb 11, 2024 21:04
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I’ve been listening to a podcast that’s basically rob reiner explaining how the cia, Cubans and the mob all ended up killing jfk, so I decided to revisit JFK. Can’t stand Costner’s accent but beyond that what really struck me is there is so much evidence that contradicts the official story not all of it even made it into the movie! I thought the narrative itself was made up though and Costners character was fictional, but Garrison was real and that trial actually happened  There’s so much to cover the movie does suffer, and the courtroom scene isn’t as great as I remembered it being as a kid. By the end I forgot why Shaw was even on trial because the entire presentation is about events that didn’t involve Shaw directly. Funny to see aunt Jackie and Newman on the DA’s team. Also took me a while to figure out where Gary oldman was cause he looks exactly like Oswald.
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Feb 11, 2024 21:34
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Mat Cauthon posted:[b]Suicide Squad (2016) One more thing - I had absolutely zero idea that the meme line of "she was fearless and crazier than him, and God help anyone that disrespected his queen" or however it goes was from this movie so when Viola Davis said it in her Waller voice I felt like I was having a stroke.
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Feb 11, 2024 22:27
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Upgraded, Amazon's new romcom. Basically a middle of the road and largely inoffensive knock-off of The Devil Wears Prada.
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Feb 11, 2024 22:40
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The Holdovers: This was pretty good though I felt a bit too long. Maybe it’s just watching it at home vs theater, but I was feeling the length at times. Overall it’s a familiar story but with a little different flavor and top notch performances and direction. I think I didn’t really fully connected with all the characters, though the soundtrack really does help one feel the vibe at least. Watching Giamatti drop John Adams like bombs again was fun. Complaint: Giamatti is in that alcohol store in Boston and there’s all these nice looking bottles and he still goes for the Jim Bean. Expand your tastes! (Though for course this a theme). Glad he grabbed the Louis at the end at least. As for cuts for time: maybe some of other boys. They add some characterization, but you get a lot of that from the three mains together anyways. Also could probably skip the hooker scene.
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Feb 11, 2024 22:54
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Dr. Yinz Ljubljana posted:American Fiction : pulls a little bit of Kaufman out of its rear end at the end but is a wonderful combo of the movie you saw in the trailers and a touching family drama you didn't. Sterling K Brown and Jeffrey Wright need to be together more often. A nice, if dated, idea that manages more laughs per minute than other satirical movies in recent history Yeah I went in hearing that the trailers were kind of misleading so I was expecting the movie to be secretly like really ridiculous and weird ala Sorry to Bother You, but instead it was actually way more grounded and heartfelt than all that. Great movie with a phenomenal cast doing their best work. It balances out both things really well and ends up being pretty drat cohesive in the end. Speaking of movies that were much different than I expected, I finally watched Phantom Thread for the first time. Based on what I’d heard, I spent years thinking the whole movie was basically just two characters over one night and one of them poisoned the other to death. Poison ended up playing a MUCH smaller role in the plot than I thought it would. Though obviously still significant. But instead it was much bigger and complicated than that, with their relationship taking a lot of twists and turns in the lengthy time that the film spans. All time performance from DDL, but Vicky Krieps was phenomenal. I’m surprised she has mostly escaped being swallowed up by Hollywood.
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Feb 12, 2024 06:10
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Big Mean Jerk posted:At this point I only have the thread bookmarked so I can read outrageously bad takes That last finale by the drat is absolute torture, too.
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Feb 12, 2024 18:58
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Doesn't Jared Leto have like 10 minutes of screen time? I hated every minute of him in the movie but don't remember him killing it for me.
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Feb 12, 2024 19:35
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i like br2049 as a concept more than i enjoyed actually watching it. looked great and had some interesting stuff going on but it was too long and quiet overall for me to ever crave watching it again really.
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Feb 12, 2024 23:04
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BR2049 is one of my favorite movies. While I would still prefer anyone else was cast in Leto's role, I've come around to his performance simply because it works for him to be a viscerally gross creep who people worship and is absurdly arrogant yet philosophically vapid. It's one of those castings like Kevin Spacey in Seven where it just works. Still, I can't fault anyone for not pushing past it to get there.
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Feb 12, 2024 23:30
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Leto's part was written with David Bowie in mind but he passed before filming began.
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Feb 13, 2024 05:39
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Midjack posted:Leto's part was written with David Bowie in mind but he passed before filming began. You shouldn't tell people this even though it's the truth. It makes his casting so much worse
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Feb 13, 2024 06:12
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