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I just watched a slick little exploitation film called Vigilante Force. Highly recommend it for the conclusion alone. It starts out as a pretty standard small town-big gun movie, but it very quickly unfolds into a kind of refreshing satire on vigilante movies.
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Sep 27, 2014 18:36
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coyo7e posted:I love Human Centipede, but I was laughing out loud within the first 60 seconds and still feel that it's a satire of the genre. I'll still never understand what makes people think the rear end-to-mouth horror movie was intended seriously. Then again, you can still think it's crap as satire. But that's why The Human Centipede 2 exists. It's the rare sequel to a relatively mediocre movie that is leaps and bounds better than the original. EDIT: Then again, again, Tom Six is kind of a poor man's Jörg Buttgereit. The Human Centipede is okay, and Full Sequence is pretty good, but Nekromantik is one of the greatest movies of all time. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 00:46
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Franchescanado posted:I put it up there with Cannibal Holocaust and the original I Spit On Your Grave. Just bleak movies. Cannibal Holocaust really isn't that bleak a movie. It doesn't say that there's no hope for mankind, it ends explicitly with, "There might be hope for mankind if people are willing to break the law." I haven't seen I Spit On Your Grave, but from what I understand it's just kind of a lovely movie. HC2 and Cannibal Holocaust are both good.
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Sep 30, 2014 02:26
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coyo7e posted:I tried watching the new I Spit on Your Grave and got the same vibe - I can read about it, but I can't sit through 10-20 minutes of someone being abused to that extent, with the only payoff being a non-enjoyable and protracted revenge sequence. You should see Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast. While not technically a rape-and-revenge movie, it has the distinction of being the only film I've ever seen where the rapist literally dies of impotence. It's also a disquietingly beautiful movie with a good sense of humor about it self. Also, the only truly great porno chic movie.
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Sep 30, 2014 03:38
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I'm almost afraid to find out...
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Sep 30, 2014 05:35
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Franchescanado posted:Cannibal Holocaust is literally a movie about people finding savages who rape and torture each other to film them raping and torturing each other. When the film crew doesn't get enough rape and torture, they manipulate the cannibals into violent extremes, causing them to ironically be raped and tortured, then eaten. The main characters are all detestable and have no value for life. The savages, while ignorant, are still very cruel to each other. It's only the last the last few minutes of the movie where there are people saying "wow, this was hosed up, aren't people crazy?" I disagree. The indigenous peoples being depicted as 'savages' needs to be fundamentally understood with two givens that the film makes explicit: 1) Diegetically, the civilized characters - both the filmmakers and the military - act out savage violence on these peoples before any of them actually do in the context of the film. Obviously we're meant to take the practices of the natives as static and primordial in some sense - an unchanging holdover from bygone eras. But to say that the indigenous, isolated peoples acting like savages is fundamentally analogous to the way they are treated by their colonial oppressors is a false equivalency. My reading of Deodato's film is much more anti-Western than this. He is indeed proposing that we should understand and accept that the so-called savages have a inalienable right to live the way they do, and it is in fact our naive liberal impositions which are oppressive. This is pointed up by the fact that... 2) Despite the liberal, Western characters eventually all agreeing, "Wow, the filmmakers who we all acknowledged staged footage and passed it off as genuine were really hosed up people," their solution to this is not to, like, distribute information about what the film contains, but to burn it outright, thus destroying all evidence of our colonial crimes against these indigenous peoples. Monroe naval-gazingly wonders "who the real cannibals are," but he is overtly satisfied with the conclusion where Alan's legacy as an ethnographic trailblazer is preserved and nobody actually confronts the extent of human suffering. It's clear that the real savages are the ones that coin the terms and pass the judgments. Furthermore, Deodato's conclusion is optimistic in the fact that he shows that this information is impossible to repress, not necessarily because we have noble values, but because ironically our drive for personal gain inevitably betrays the corrupt interior of our value systems. I don't see this as bleak, because, again, the point is not that man is fundamentally cruel and savage, but, rather, that the experience of the oppressed is legitimized. Death means something again, whereas Monroe clearly sees it as just obscenity to be repressed. The bleak ending is the one where all values are meaningless and death means nothing. In Cannibal Holocaust, the values of the natives are continually vindicated, and their suffering is framed as abjectly tragic.
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Sep 30, 2014 07:18
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Franchescanado posted:I'm not disagreeing with any of this, and it's well thought out. However, I've watched an hour of people being violently cruel to "savages" just to create entertainment. And the movie ending with people, much like the viewer, acknowledging the evil they have just watched, feeling disgusted, and agreeing to burn the footage, in my eyes, isn't optimistic. The evil is still done. The fact that they destroy it to cover everything up, to me, doesn't spin things in a positive light. I've still seen the depths of cruelty people can sink in. Lives were still ruined. It has happened, and can easily happen again. They don't destroy the film. They want to, but they demonstrably don't succeed. The final evil, in which truth is repressed, is subverted and truth survives. Portraying the fact of irrevocable cruelty is not in and of itself bleak. Bleakness inspires no hope for vindication of the oppressed. The 'savages' of Cannibal Holocaust are vindicated. They succeed in enacting ritualized, symbolical reparation-revenge upon their oppressors and in sending the cursed object (the film) back to the oppressor. And the cursed object survives despite attempts to destroy it, through a black magic that we know as the black market. The cannibals have successfully 'crossed' themselves and returned the curse of the oppressor. This doesn't mean that the cruelty and its consequences magically go away, or that oppression won't continue, but these are naive fantasies, reducing vindication to a fantastic, unachievable endgame of egalitarian justice. The hope that the cannibals have is in a justice that is pertinent to them, not one that is palatable to their oppressors. To say that this is bleak because we have witnessed people staging violent cruelty to create entertainment ignores the question of whether or not the oppressor deserves any kind of vindication. We are the ones capitalizing on suffering, we are the bad guys. When we are exposed as hypocrites and sadists and the oppressed are vindicated by their own actions, this is not bleak. We have not earned the right to our progressive liberal self-conception. This is a good thing. The militant oppressed vindicate themselves. This is a good thing.
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Sep 30, 2014 19:07
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teraflame posted:I really enjoyed watching Print the Legend, the documentary about desktop 3D printing startups. Are there any other good documentaries like it on netflix? I mean... there are good documentaries on Netflix. Two pretty cool ones I saw recently were Teenage and Make Believe. Particle Fever is also tremendous. But if you're looking for something more in line of, like, the conflict between idealism and entrepreneurship, there's always Downloaded and Spark: A Burning Man Story. Which also aren't particularly good. Oh, oh! Chappelle's Show: The 50 Million Dollar Question is a great doc, but it's not streaming on Netflix: http://vimeo.com/97769906
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Oct 9, 2014 03:36
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Not really. If Smith ever joked about stoners and weed before Zack & Miri, it mostly came from observation/being kind of a poser. He's basically a 40-something Weedvangelist, but his films were crummy hack work way before that.
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Oct 9, 2014 18:47
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District B13 is swell.
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Oct 15, 2014 01:30
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red19fire posted:This is the only way to enjoy Snowpiercer, turn your critical brain off ... Nah, turn it back on, it's much more enjoyable that way. Watching it with your brain turned off is, as fishtobaskets discovered, a fast way to miss that it's very much like Brazil. For instance, the baby-eater monologue may be eccentric, but it's far from obvious in any sense, much less obviously bad. It's Juvenalian satire. The point is that the allegory is absolutely scathing in its depiction of 'the future,' and Joon-ho doesn't care if we find it ridiculous or not, because it's true. He wants nothing more than our spontaneous reaction to life being depicted in such a bereft, hopeless, and extreme way. This is exactly what Terry Gilliam does in Brazil: Juxtapose images of such shocking grotesque with black humor and epic fantasy. One needs to watch it more like a fairy tale, filtered through the strange subjective of a meek, little office boy who has bouts of Don Quixote syndrome. In Snowpiercer, it's the same poo poo, except the subjective of a guy who is both a hero and a cannibal. People should watch the movie with this in mind, that they're essentially seeing Curtis's culture shock at the progressing moral depravity of the world. There are gonna be parts that get full on ridiculous. And, for God's sake, there's already an underground version of Snowpiercer. It's called The Mole People, and it's equally absurd and awesome. EDIT: And, to a greater extent, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
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Nov 3, 2014 04:24
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MadMattH posted:Don't forget Logan's Run. Also, Ben Ketai's Beneath from 2013.
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Nov 3, 2014 04:42
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MadMattH posted:OTOH, people who consider Snowpiercer to be any sort of good science fiction are the same people who think Sharknado was a thing that could actually happen. Anyone who thought that getting on a loving train was going to save them because the entire planet was frozen deserved whatever the people who convinced them to get on in the first place did to them because they were too stupid to actually continue their existence. They might as well have said, "We are saving you with MAGIC!" Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean turning your brain entirely off. Who the Hell thinks Sharknado could actually happen? And what does this have to do with the enjoyment of a fantasy film? The people who get on the apocalypse train aren't stupid. For all intents and purposes, the God engine works. It's that the price of it working is that some people are farmed as disposable sacrifices. It's really not as farfetched as people are getting hung up on. It's certainly not comparable to a shark tornado, which - though I haven't seen the film - I'm assuming is a case where the fantasy conceit exists solely to look ridiculous and not actually comment upon anything other than its own ridiculousness. Snowpiercer takes absurdity and does a really good job of using it for reasons other than self-indulgence. quote:The train was just a heavy handed plot device that didn't really do anything. Saying that the train is metaphor does nothing to change that the train is a poo poo metaphor. What makes it a poo poo metaphor? The lack of plausibility? quote:Snowpiercer didn't even do the action adroitly, it certainly wasn't special in that regard. When the acting wasn't flat it was scene chewing. The sets were ugly. It probably smelled weird too. wafflesnsegways posted:Yeah, Snowpiercer just isn't firing on all cylinders. It's got an off-the-wall premise, but instead of embracing that, it still spins its wheels with lots of exposition. It's an action movie, but the action is choppy and not clear. It has a cool idea of progression as they advance through the train, but you don't really get a great feel for the train as a place. Now we're getting into a weird place where Snowpiercer is apparently too absurd to be taken seriously, but also not absurd enough to be appreciated on its own terms. All of the exposition in Snowpiercer serves a purpose of contextualizing the characters and giving the spectator a feel of the train as a place. Furthermore, this exposition routinely pays off at some later point in the story. I'm thinking particularly of stuff like when Gilliam attempts to get Curtis to stop the campaign forward and instead hold the water-supply of the train hostage. This isn't the movie spinning its wheels, it's exposition for when it's revealed that Gilliam is being coerced by the Conductor, that the boiler room was where the revolution was supposed to end, and that Curtis was then going to be escorted to the front of the train and seduced by its pleasures. Ironically, the reason this doesn't happen is because Curtis is written in such a way that he's eager to defy the plausibility of this strategy in favor of pushing forward. The train itself as a feat of production design is amazing. The sheer contrast between the privileged areas and the prisons and slums is accentuated by our consciousness that they're literally only a few feet away from one another. And Joon-ho films these narrow corridors very well, giving us a proper sense that the further forward these characters go in the train, the more and more it feels like a stable and total world and not just a train with some nice cars and some bad cars.
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Nov 3, 2014 15:25
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Wolfsheim posted:I don't want to start another borderline autistic argument about how trains do/don't work but I also watched Snowpiercer last night and while I enjoyed it (and fully accepted it's ultra-realistic premise I think it feels more abrupt because to a certain extent it's meant to be that way. By the time Curtis reaches the front of the train, one fully expects that he's going to follow through on his plan: "Kill them all" and bring the train (somehow) to a safe halt. But then it's revealed that the entire 'rebellion' was staged for the benefit of the train. It basically leaves no other options open other than give up your flesh and destroy the train, and that's part of what makes the film emotionally effective. It's not giving us the satisfaction of a hitch-less revolution where the "silent majority" survive and overcome, and instead suggests that the solution lies beyond our desire to perpetuate ourselves. This is very similar to Children of Men.
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Nov 4, 2014 07:04
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), some of the writing is really bad and the ending felt...I dunno, rushed? It felt like they had to get all the reveals out of the way and just ran through them quickly without really trying to give them time to settle or coalesce. I mean, the imagery of
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I refuse to enjoy science-fiction that isn't science-fiction. Like, seriously, how incompetent do you need to be to make a science-fiction movie that isn't a science-fiction movie?
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Nov 4, 2014 17:32
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MadMattH posted:I'm sure if I were to post any of my favorite movies (which I do not consider perfect), you guys would have a fine old time picking them apart too. But, unlike you guys, I wouldn't care in the least and it wouldn't change if I liked it or not. Again, this is just your projection.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:08
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MadMattH posted:Sure, sure man. Nobody ever had anything to say about my opinion about a movie they liked. It was all me. No, I mean the part where you... MadMattH posted:I really like that I absolutely must like(and apparently for the exact same reasons)the same movies as you or you feel the need to retaliate in some manner. Sorry my opinions differ from this apparently hive mind. Four or five people on a forum aren't a hivemind, that's just three people agreeing to a relative extent. Your projection is making this out to be far more pernicious than it actually is. quote:I'm sure if I were to post any of my favorite movies (which I do not consider perfect), you guys would have a fine old time picking them apart too. But, unlike you guys, I wouldn't care in the least and it wouldn't change if I liked it or not. This is textbook projection. You extrapolated this from people disagreeing with you on Snowpiercer. Furthermore, you're trying to make this about their supposed intentional disingenuousness in believing the things they like don't have flaws. Nobody thinks what they like don't have flaws; they're disagreeing with you on your summary conclusion of a work's quality. This is a misdirection. quote:Here's one for you to have fun with: More misdirection: We are trying to make you 'feel bad.' We don't actually believe that you're wrong about things you find to be of poor quality with Snowpiercer, we're just being uber-contrarian for giggles. I haven't seen Dune, but if it's comparable at all to Snowpiercer I don't trust any opinion you have on it, positive or negative.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:30
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:On the other hand, there is no reason at all that Outland is set in the future. This is exactly how I feel about The Rover.
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Nov 4, 2014 23:08
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:There's totally a reason dude: Mad Max 1. That movie is barely set in the future as well. It's actual setting is the rear end-end of Western Civilization. I didn't mind the homage. Which is funny because Michod has said that he doesn't really see the movies as being very similar. I don't even know that one can call The Rover an homage, since it's concerned far less with inventing an aesthetic or cultural ideal of 'the future' and seems to make this a post-apocalypse that is even more explicitly about the current epoch. I'm thinking especially of scenes like when Robert Pattinson is sitting in the car listening to a pop song. Even in scenes like when the cop corners him in the motel room, cinematographically our emphasis is on Pearce and not any unique qualities of 'the world' itself. I don't know how I feel about that in regards to Mad Max other than I feel like that's an instance where there's a... what Stephen King would call a "warmness" to it. The Rover has this cold distanciation from its subject that seems rather common in films now but that I don't think makes me respond to the film as anything other than a kind of geek show. I feel similarly about Gummo, which I think it has much more in common with, in line with that idea of the "rear end-end of Western Civilization."
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Nov 5, 2014 00:10
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They could just eat the corpses.
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Nov 6, 2014 00:19
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Magnus Gallant posted:Oh well no film is perfect. It's a Wonderful Life, Au Hasard Balthazar, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex, Terror of Mechagodzilla, The Wild Child, Days of Heaven, Miller's Crossing, Dazed & Confused, and Moulin Rouge! are all "perfect," so, no. SolidSnakesBandana posted:Everybody knows the perfect film is The Lion King. Tell me one loving thing wrong with that movie. That it's Nietzchean, racist propaganda for little kids. And not even the good kind, like Bambi.
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Nov 6, 2014 02:22
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MadMattH posted:I honestly think some of my issues with the 90's Disney movies is that they mostly came out after I was already out of high school. It also doesn't help that I don't care for musicals. They were also mostly bad. The best Disney film is still either Dumbo or Sleeping Beauty, I'm not sure which.
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Nov 6, 2014 02:34
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Hercules is also quite good. The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh should also be up there among all time great Disney films.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:30
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regulargonzalez posted:Dazed and Confused, really? I mean it's a great film but Mitch alone makes it far from perfect. Count how many times he touches his face when he talks to whatshername, the girl that's his age. SO DISTRACTING I haven't seen the Before films, but Mitch Kramer constantly touching his face is just another one of those honest things that makes Linklater's film genuine. Everything awkward in that movie works to its benefit, and I consider that a kind of perfection.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:53
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My favorite part of Don't Be a Menace (which is streaming, so watch it) is when Shawn Wayans' mom straight up tells him she's leaving because there are no positive depictions of Black women in ghetto movies.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:49
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Gunday from this year is pretty good, if only for the running gag of the characters breaking wooden chairs over one another, reaching its ultimate punch line when they're fighting in a mine and a mine cart literally just appears out of nowhere with a wooden chair in it.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:28
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Non-sequitor: The Rocketeer is like the best parts of 1941 rolled together with the best parts of Raiders of the Lost Ark and just a little dab of WW II propaganda cartoon.
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Nov 12, 2014 03:23
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Everblight posted:Is anyone talking about NetFlix's new categories based on characters from NetFlix shows? Holy Hell this is streaming? Should I see Cruising before seeing it?
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Nov 12, 2014 04:06
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:You should watch Cruising instead of it, yes. I'm sorry, I went against your advice, and now I think I might be watching this generation's version of Overnight.
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Nov 12, 2014 04:40
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Yeah, no poo poo. And I like Franco! I can't imagine what it'd be like for someone who liked him even slightly less than I do. I want you to try it again, but imagine that it's the sequel to Jackass Number Two. It's actually a really, really blackly funny movie. Basically Mathews' imagining of the decadent queer sexual liberation of the '80s is the Rectum scene from Irreversible. It's a wholly unintentional, but wholly remarkable look into the queer fetishism of Franco as a straight male, as a kind of intellectualized expansion on how 'homoerotic' behavior of the Jackass crew, where, like, sexual humiliation is a key form of social bonding.
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Nov 12, 2014 04:51
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Why do you want to ruin Jackass 2 for me? I don't. It's literally my favorite documentary. I'm saying James Franco is like Johnny Knoxville, except he totally doesn't realize it. "Everybody watches porn! Everybody!" he says with the craziest loving eyes. EDIT: It also features music by A Place to Bury Strangers, so I support anything that brings those guys more attention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgrl3GBAFKM K. Waste fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 04:55
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Can't wait to get Harakiri in the mail and then double-feature it with the Takashi Miike remake. I wish Gozu was streaming, too. Oh well, looks like about good a time as any to finally watch Ichi the Killer.
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Nov 13, 2014 02:08
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Oh, my God, I think the same exact image of Harvey Keitel has been photoshopped into the promo images of both Blue in the Face and Smoke on streaming. Also, finally watched Coffee and Cigarettes, and it was great. "Cousins?" was my favorite segment.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:03
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Malloreon posted:I just saw End of Watch as it left instant. Holy poo poo. Great movie. Interestingly, Sabotage went up on instant at around the same time. Now, watch Sabotage, and keep in mind that it is not a generic Arnie pick and is, indeed, an Oliver Stone-esque indictment of the War on Drugs. Then everyone go out and see Fury.
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Nov 22, 2014 14:42
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I don't know about that. The film is thoroughly consistent in its portrayal of its protagonists as a gang of ruthless, borderline sociopath thugs and all the attempts at 'humanizing' them - well, humanizing Arnie, who basically plays a deadbeat dad to a bunch of action movie youngbloods who have clearly been taught too well by the old school - is consistently undermined by an omnipresent tone of cynicism. A perfect example is the scene in the strip club. In a generic action movie, the strippers would just be hanger-on's, titillating formalities meant to coerce the spectator into accepting the inevitable violence as a kind of ecstatic, libidinal release. In Ayer's vision, the strippers are actually portrayed as people who can't stand these assholes. There's a 'blink and you miss it' close up that Ayer gets of one of them rolling her eyes, and I think this is absolutely the reaction he intends the spectator to have to these foul-mouthed, 'roid-raging stereotypes. I think what some might of seen as compromise I accepted more readily as fairly overt subversion. Compromise, to me, would have been getting the suspicious feeling that Ayer wants us to sympathize with Arnie when he massacres the Mexican gin joint. Instead, I just felt both terrified and saddened by what he had become.
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Nov 22, 2014 19:51
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A MIRACLE posted:Well I watched about 1.5 hours of Jack Reacher before calling it. It just didn't grab me in a way that made me care about the conclusion. I started watching Arachnophobia this morning and it's awesome so far. Arachnophobia is, indeed, awesome.
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Nov 25, 2014 18:12
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A MIRACLE posted:The first scene is some scientists flying a helicopter over the jungle, I was like huh this reminds me of JP. then, boom, Executive Producer Steven Spielberg in the opening credits. haha. The kicker being that it was made before Jurassic Park.
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Nov 25, 2014 23:39
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Nroo posted:The gently caress are you talking about. Seriously, I saw Some Like It Hot cold on TCM one night and it's still one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. If that movie has 'lost its charm,' I can't imagine what people must think of old Coen Bros. comedies, as it's pretty much the prototype for everything they did.
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Nov 26, 2014 17:48
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I don't find the child molestation jokes in Airplane! as uncomfortable as the Black jokes, though. And even those are still pretty funny.A MIRACLE posted:The thing with comedy movies is they're very timely... and what's funny changes, gets edgier, more ironic etc over time Some Like It Hot is still so relevant. More so, even...
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Nov 26, 2014 18:52
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Anne Whateley posted:I laugh my rear end off at Bringing Up Baby. Last I saw it was on Prime streaming. Yeah, Bringing Up Baby is also a laugh riot.
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Nov 27, 2014 01:44
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