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Bloody smoke, Young Ones owns bones. Recommended if you're in for a more romantic, sprawling take on the post-apocalyptic film. It's like East of Eden meets Blade Runner.
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Feb 18, 2015 06:18
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+1 gets off to a rocky start, and it's a pretty sleazy movie, but it ultimately shapes up into a very creative modern take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Recommend it.
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Feb 20, 2015 07:52
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It's a Sci-Fi channel original movie with heart and a suitable budget. It was one of the best action movies of last year, though it's probably better if you go into it thinking of it as a remake of The Brain That Wouldn't Die.
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Feb 22, 2015 00:13
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:Looks like someone didn't see John Wick, The Raid 2, Lucy or Edge Of Tomorrow I saw The Raid 2 (one of my top ten of the year) and Lucy (one of my favorites which wasn't necessarily top ten). And RoboCop is better than Edge of Tomorrow. EDIT: Well, I'll say this - RoboCop is definitely a better remake of The Brain That Wouldn't Die than Edge of Tomorrow was a remake of The Americanization of Emily.
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Feb 22, 2015 00:20
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:I thought the action was the weakest part of the movie. The cold open, the cafe gun fight, the assault on the warehouse, and the final tower raid are all competently-to-well shot scenes. The only scene that doesn't work in this regard is literally the one that looks like a video game and is constantly being interrupted by Gary Oldman commenting on why everything looks so mechanical and unexciting. This is all mute, however, because none of these films mentioned are as good as Fury, but there were plenty of great action films last year, and a lot of them were better than Edge of Tomorrow: The Raid 2, Lucy, Gunday, Age of Extinction, 22 Jump Street, Days of Future Past, Sabotage...
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Feb 22, 2015 00:30
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:Oh come on, you really disliked Edge of Tomorrow that much that you thought a loving Transformers movie was better? What did you think was so wrong with EoT? This has nothing to do with my overt dislike for Edge of Tomorrow, but with my relative indifference to it. Age of Extinction did a much better job of making me feel apocalyptic shock and existential dread than Edge of Tomorrow.
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Feb 22, 2015 00:40
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Heads up, The Quest for Fire is not streaming in its original aspect ratio, but in a full screen version that appears to be a VHS transfer.
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Feb 22, 2015 02:56
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Hours was pretty good, and Himmatwala is an absolutely maddening but charming little Bollywood number I quite recommend.
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Feb 23, 2015 08:54
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So Showgirls actually loving rules. gently caress the haters, Paul Verhoeven is the man.
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Feb 25, 2015 00:21
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It really does. As someone pointed out here recently, it looks awesome, too. Seriously, I was screen-grabbing stills the whole way through. I feel really bad that no matter what Paul Verhoeven did in his entire career making films in America, people still never loving caught the net. I'd honestly place Showgirls above RoboCop, and just below Starship Troopers in terms of his best American films. It's that good. (Context: Total Recall is unbeatable, basically. He should have just retired after that.)
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Feb 25, 2015 00:42
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Because Robert A. Heinlein's book was just so good....
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Feb 25, 2015 02:49
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poo poo, I forgot about Basic Instinct. It's definitely not as good as Total Recall or Starship Troopers, but it's definitely slightly better than Showgirls. They're pretty much companion pieces, anyway. Written by the same dude, and even one of the set arrangements in Showgirls is a direct callback to the Church dance club scene in Instinct.
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Feb 25, 2015 04:16
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precision posted:No loving way. I haven't watched Basic Instinct since like, the 90s, but no loving way is it better than Showgirls. I will watch it again just so I can type a big effortpost proving how wrong this opinion is. Dude, Basic Instinct is indispensable Verhoeven. Cocoa Ninja posted:You guys go a little overboard for Showgirls. It's well shot and campy but has no real dramatic tension, it's a goofy movie. The films are thematically related, but the difference is that Basic Instinct essentially presents itself as a cheeky, but basically no-nonsense thriller that just happens to take place in the Hell of a misogynistic porn-junkie. (Paul Verhoeven has literally responded to criticisms about the plausibility of the film's plot by saying that Tramell is the Devil.) Showgirls is a completely different beast, presenting another story of a pornographic Hell, but from a sympathetic perspective that identifies with the exploited women. There's no dramatic tension because no matter what decisive actions their characters take, Verhoeven and Eszterhas make it clear that social mobility is all but impossible in a marketplace dominated by male sexual desires. The film's only explicit sex scene literally ends with the star flopping around in the pool like a fish. The camp and goofiness is there so that it's impossible to identify with the women only as appealing sex objects, and instead we're confronted with the uncomfortable humanity of people who are basically stock characters in an out-of-date, particularly well-shot sexploitation movie. Both films are about inverting paradigms of the male gaze. In Basic Instinct, the judgmental gaze of damnation Hitchcock is given to the woman-as-Devil, and dooms men. In Showgirls, we get a Russ Meyer movie a la Beyond the Valley of the Dolls but without the disingenuous moralizing at the end.
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Feb 25, 2015 05:45
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Cocoa Ninja posted:I don't know that you're wrong if you HAD to give a generous textual analysis, but I'm not convinced most of the intention wasn't titilation. The film's content doesn't preclude titillation, but you can contrast the dance sequences to, say, Santanico's tease in From Dusk till Dawn or the stripping in Abel Ferrara's Fear City and find that these differences aren't the result of Showgirls trying and failing to be primarily titillating, but of Verhoeven filming sexuality in much the same way that he depicts violence: with a constant eye for excess and conscious artifice, that which destroys the 'immersive' qualities of the gaze and shocks the viewer into realizing what they are actually watching. In From Dusk till Dawn, Santanico's performance is sexy as all get out because it is filmed that way - the camera constantly emphasizes Hayek's larger than life, 'more woman than woman' qualities, juxtaposing these with salacious images of dumb-founded men ogling her. But this titillation serves a narrative purpose, by contextualizing Santanico's vampiric powers in terms that are tangible and 'real' rather than remote and esoteric. Leave aside that Showgirls only features one hilariously un-arousing sex scene, to say nothing of an out-of-nowhere, cruel gang rape - the way Verhoeven and cinematographer Jost Vacano narrativize these sexual displays is not nearly the same. There are virtually no salacious cutaways to individuals gazing unless these are men who feature as overt antagonists within the film's plot, or else they are scenes like Nomi gazing in awe as Cristal emerges from the volcano, which, while connoting a certain level of erotic attraction, is more importantly a moment of inspiration. Otherwise, Verhoeven and Vacano film these sequences in ways that counter-intuitively exclude the frequently unseen audience of the Stardust, observing from angles and positions that emphasize the purely aesthetic qualities of this burlesque ballet rather than sexual desire. Or, they focus on specific interactions between characters (Cristal vs. Nomi), or sabotage, or close-ups on fallen performers crying in pain. None of this is particularly erotic, and it's actually harder to argue that it's supposed to be than it is to simply conclude they are not erotic. Now, compare the dance sequences of Showgirls to Magic Mike, another film that, while clearly featuring sexy and evidently talented dancers, is constantly satirizing the intangible, easily exploited artifice of the sexual ideals the performers embody. And Nomi's motivations are simple: She doesn't want to be a whore. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Feb 25, 2015 |
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Feb 25, 2015 07:51
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The Fly 2 sucks, but it's a way better sequel to RoboCop than RoboCop 2. RoboCop 2 is also not as interesting as the new RoboCop by virtue of cribbing the morbidity and cynicism of the original film and going nowhere interesting with it. The new RoboCop, on the other hand, despite Samuel L. Jackson's often hilarious performance, in no way attempts to be nearly as blackly comic as the original, and is better than any 'true' sequel for it. Instead, it takes a much more removed and sterile perspective to match its aesthetic 'streamlining' of an 'old model.' This is a given from the opening sequences of robot armies patrolling the streets in full force as a colonial regime that successfully stamps out resistance. The point of RoboCop is that we didn't learn anything from RoboCop. We're not laughing because we haven't earned the right to treat our contemporary investment in globalized oppression with levity.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:59
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It's also co-written by Frank Miller, who, despite probably sharing Verhoeven's anti-corporate affinities, is bound to interpret these in ways that are implicitly pro-fascist. The ending of RoboCop is just a comic-reversal on the 'stormy' conclusion of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. RoboCop 2 treats it as 'a step in the right direction.' It's odd, because RoboCop 2 is basically Frank Miller doing to Paul Verhoeven what Paul Verhoeven eventually did with Robert A. Heinlein.
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Feb 26, 2015 04:18
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david_a posted:Someone mentioned Frank Miller's involvement and I wanted to expand on that a bit. Miller wrote the original script for RoboCop 2 (he's actually in the movie too as a scientist). However, the studio wisely thought it was unfilmable and yanked a lot of stuff out of it. I've heard that when Irvin Kershner (the director of Empire Strikes Back) was brought on to save the film he edited it even more, sometimes even doing daily rewrites. I don't know if he was going to retire anyway, but RoboCop 2 ended up being the last movie he directed. Also: Irvin Kershner just strikes me as, like, the completely wrong person to direct a RoboCop sequel.
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Feb 26, 2015 18:14
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Basebf555 posted:So I probably only have time to watch one movie before March 1 and there a few still in my queue that are going to disappear. Should I watch The Elephant Man, Lair of the White Worm, or Leaving Las Vegas? In this order: 1) The Elephant Man 2) Lair of the White Worm 3) Leaving Las Vegas Chichevache posted:Also Boondocks season 4 is finally up. If you haven't been watching that show, you hosed up. If you haven't been watching Season 4, you made the right choice.
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Feb 27, 2015 17:38
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Chichevache posted:I've never seen season 4, but I'm watching the first episode and it ain't too bad. axleblaze posted:In the other hand Boondocks mostly hasn't been worth watching since season 1. The worst thing about season 4 is that there's literally an episode where Huey - as a loving slave - has an inner monologue expounding upon how we shouldn't be surprised because of the systemic erosion of the middle-class. There are a lot of really inspired episodes from the second and third seasons, but axle is right in that in general it really hasn't been a very consistently on point program. But when McGruder left for the far superior Black Jesus, the precipitous decline in not only quality but also just basic competency with handling the show's sociopolitical content is kind of astounding. It's basically ended as a glorified minstrel show.
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Feb 27, 2015 18:39
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Baron von Eevl posted:It was his first studio film and I personally think he was intimidated by Mel Brooks. He was, and the story is that Mel Brooks was a fan of Eraserhead and basically just decided to give Lynch a shot at the film based on it and generally thinking he was a brilliant guy. If I can find a vid of him or Lynch telling their sides of it, I'll post it. I remember seeing Brooks do some HBO special or doc or something where he talked about it and it was pretty funny in that classic, coy 'Mel' kind of way.
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Feb 28, 2015 07:54
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NESguerilla posted:Hm. How about Young Ones? I wouldn't mind watching some Michael Shannon tonight but that ones got pretty meh reviews too. Young Ones is loving great, though. It's East of Eden meets Blade Runner.
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Mar 1, 2015 03:07
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I'd argue they both do a pretty good job. The longer I go without seeing 300: Rise of an Empire, the more fondly I remember most aspects of it. It's at least an exceptionally bad movie, which, following 300, is about as good as an exceptionally good sequel. The writing is uneven and a lot of the themes aren't explored to their best potential, but the acting, action, and direction are all quite good and, I dare say, give the original a run for its money.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:07
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I didn't much care for Joe. There were definitely some really astounding aspects to it, but it's basically something of a more country-fried retread of the Southern Gothic he did with Undertow, but unlike Undertow a lot of it didn't really feel... I don't even know. I think I just checked out entirely once the kid's dad beats the guy to death for his wine. I just rejected that scene on such a visceral level, and I get that it's deliberate in that way, but it just didn't take.
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Mar 15, 2015 01:05
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Malloreon posted:Dhoom is expiring on the 18th. It's basically buddy cop Fast and the Furious in Hindi, with way more romance and songs. I'm just over halfway through it, and it's not bad. Gunday and Special 26 are also pretty drat good.
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Mar 15, 2015 05:19
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Cognac McCarthy posted:"You Talk Too Much" hasn't held up very well, is all I'm saying. White Hollywood writers 3 years later coming up with a song that's just a couple steps below that just isn't surprising to me. Lol, but that's not what you said: Cognac McCarthy posted:I don't know, if you look at rap from the era, it's not actually that much better. I think slow, predictable, ultimately lame put-down rap is sort of just what was around at the time. And you were wrong. Even "You Talk Too Much" is not, like, just 'a couple steps above' corny white dudes appropriating rap music to shallowly appeal to white kids and turn a quick buck on a product that is already just a gender-flipped version of Teen Wolf. "Fight the Power" dropped in the same year, dude. And, as others have said, even if you don't particularly care for Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions and N.W.A. both dropped majorly influential records at that time. The entire Hip Hop culture was on the verge of a Renaissance that would explode in the '90s with the Native Tongues movement on the East Coast and the gangsta rap/G-Funk movement on the West. Teen Witch is reflective of sanitized perceptions of Hip Hop that were outdated when it was made, and only don't appear so because corny white Hollywood shills don't actually care about the music or culture.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:25
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Rich Hill was a really good recommendation. Very quickly shot up to my number one film of 2014.
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Mar 16, 2015 00:00
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If you're like me and looking for 'hidden gems' of the 2014 film season you overlooked, forewarning: Cuban Fury, Someone Marry Barry, and A Long Way Down all suck.
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Mar 16, 2015 17:58
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The problem with Cuban Fury is that it expends a great cast on a mean-spirited, obnoxiously foul-mouthed comedy that isn't particularly remarkable or consistently funny in any way. The best parts of the movie are the 'dance fight' scenes, including one in particular that rivals even the Step Up films, but ironically they would work much better if the film gave its subject a little more credit. This was asking for something more like Big Fan or Griff the Invisible, but instead the movie is stuck somewhere between Balls of Fury and Blades of Glory, and that's not a good place to be. There's even a brief Simon Pegg cameo where he's driving out of a parking garage and looks at Nick Frost's character like, "What the gently caress are you doing here?," which is pretty much the spirit of the whole picture.
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Mar 16, 2015 19:27
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Kenneth Waste, have you ever watched Nigel Kneale's BEASTS? I hadn't ever heard of it.
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Mar 16, 2015 20:49
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I think you'd dig them. I mean, guy wrote for Quatermass, I'm sure I would. Those Brits knew suspense.
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Mar 16, 2015 23:43
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I've never described a film as revoltingly stupid, but Bad Johnson is revoltingly stupid.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:59
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LORD OF BUTT posted:So it's a movie about a talking dick that two of the smartest people on this subforum utterly hated. It's not the cool Marquis 'talking penis' thing. The plot is that a lecherous rear end in a top hat keeps ruining his personal relationships because of his sex addiction - though the film never addresses as such, it's explicitly a matter of him just having 'so much pussy thrown at him' - and one night wishes his penis would go away. He wakes up the next morning and his penis is gone, and has turned into a distinct person that he hangs out with while trying to figure out how to re-attach it. This would all be fine if it were, like, some sort of underground, anti-comedy, but it's the most 'lowest common denominator,' pandering, vulgar crap... and not even the good kind. It's terribly written from plot down to basic dialog, and the performances are all lovely, though especially the women, and mostly because every female role is marginally more one note and misogynistic than the male ones.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:23
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blood_dot_biz posted:I kept hearing people rave about Chef when it was released so I saw it in theaters and was really disappointed. I thought the social media aspect of it was sappy and I can't even criticize the movie without feeling like the whole food critic thing was written to make me feel guilty for doing so. That's kinda weird. The film's perception of Ramsey is colored by Carl's subjective, but he's very consistently shown to know and understand way more than Carl gives him credit for, and to be right in the final analysis. Ramsey maybe doesn't actually know all the intricacies of crafting fine cuisine, but he knows a hack job when he tastes it, and he rightfully accuses Carl of selling out. When Carl finally breaks away from Riva, he's not taking any cues from Ramsey's criticisms specifically, but that's not important. The end result is that Carl is existentially fulfilled, and the man he hates more than anything in the world couldn't be happier for him. If anything, the film's driving point about popular criticism is that while it doesn't make you feel good, it serves an essential purpose of deconstructing pretenses of 'high' and 'low' culture. The film is clearly autobiographical of Favreau's experiences moving on from relatively independent, self-financed films to big Hollywood blockbusters, the latter of which he anachronistically compares to refined dining. This, to me, only makes Ramsey's early role in the narrative more interesting, because he essentially criticizes the technical quality of Favreau's cooking/filmmaking, insisting that it has 'no heart/meaning.' By having Carl literally loose his poo poo at the critic and show up his technical ignorance, Favreau actually does something really clever: He points out that it's possible that a criticism can be 100% wrong while also being 100% accurate. It's not that the Iron Man films 'have no meaning.' It's that they have distinctive meanings that are devalued because they have been copied and copied and copied to the point that all roots in emotional authenticity are themselves just pretenses. Favreau/Carl can't even claim the defense that he's just doing what people like, because what he knows is that what people like is strictly controlled and overseen by the risk-averse Riva.
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Mar 17, 2015 04:39
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I didn't really get that impression at all. Social media is a plot device, and a well-reasoned one given its increasing significance. I mean, yeah, the film literally 'maps' Carl's progression as a independent business owner through his influence on social media, but to say this is about extolling the virtues of social media is missing the forest for the tweets. Like, there's a reason that Carl's antagonism, denial, and insecurities are epitomized and escalated in the first act by his childish use of social media to challenge a bully for... having an opinion. The film is using contemporary technology to juxtapose merely vain, self-congratulatory chauvinism and the cultivation of meaningful emotional connections. Then again, if one is just cynical about social media in general, you're probably better off watching Frank, a film that users Twitter just as if not more prominently than Chef to 'map' the progression of its protagonist. But Jon Ronson isn't nearly as good a screenwriter as Jon Favreau.
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Mar 17, 2015 05:16
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Leper Residue posted:If it wasn't for his son using social media he wouldn't have learned a drat thing. The entire plot relies on Social media to not only drat him initially, but ultimately be his savior. I mean, yeah, basically, his son saves his life. Again, Twitter and social media are more of a prop, the value that the story is expressing isn't really about the technology in and of itself. And while there is an overarching sentimentality to the film, it's appropriate because it's very specifically setting itself against the emotional alienation that comes from mass produced commodities that, while stable and profitable, coerce one into a false paradigm in which security and material needs take precedence over freedom and emotional needs. Like, Percy doesn't just use Twitter to make his dad money, he makes a short film in honor of his father. Even the finale, the re-marrying between Inez and Carl, while a cop-out, I don't think of as being entirely literal. The point is that even here, at this fanciful point at which Carl is 'a made man,' his restaurant is closed. EDIT: Also, the movie is literally food porn made by a famous fat person. I love it implicitly. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 06:02
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Another recommendation for Noah. Movie is seriously good.
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Mar 18, 2015 19:03
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Automata is a fine little film. It's a little clunky, but it functions well as ostensibly an homage to the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner. That being said, you're probs better off going to the movies and seeing Chappie, which also explicitly homages other AI movies, but instead of a sentimental fanservice, stages a vulgar sacrilege of them. Either that, or the quite great Young Ones. I know I already recommended it once, but it deserves re-mentioning. It's a great, great little film.
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Mar 19, 2015 03:54
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Well, I guess I'll need to see History since I found Safety Not Guaranteed pretty disposable.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:06
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Showgirls is loving great Yes. Skywalker OG posted:Did people hate Showgirls because it was utterly abhorrent? I can't remember who it was I was talking about it with on these forums, but one point of misapprehension in particular seems to be that the movie is trying to be erotic and failing. Of course, this is silly. There's really not that much difference between the way sex is depicted in Showgirls and the 'safe sex' scene in The Naked Gun, but nobody makes the observation that just because Priscilla Presley is sexy that the film is failing to communicate this through tone. You can compare Showgirls to just about any 60s sexploitation film and see what it looks like when a film 'fails' to be erotic. The difference is that those old sexploitation films also used comedy, but were just as haphazard in this regard, largely because they were just trying to mitigate feelings of shame that naturally come from engaging in voyeurism. Showgirls is just being effective and honest in communicating how easily exploited sex is, that the act in and of itself can be obviously un-erotic, disgusting, and comic, but we're too used to thinking of it in fantastic, appealing terms. Basically, critics were disappointed that Verhoeven's hyper-real commentary on sex was actually closer to the real thing.
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Mar 21, 2015 20:07
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Jack Gladney posted:How are we supposed to feel about that rape? Kind of a tone-ruiner, IMO. Uncle Boogeyman posted:yeah even the film's most ardent defenders admit that that scene's a sore spot. certainly makes the movie harder to recommend and sabotages the fun vibe when watching with friends. It's cinema of cruelty. At precisely the moment Nomi thinks she's reached the 'top' of the ladder, she learns the extent of the Stardust Casino's depravity. Obviously the rape is shocking, comes out of nowhere, and is weighted with a mean-spirited sadism that even the most catty scenes in the film lacks. But you're leaving out the context. Molly isn't just raped; she goes in place of Nomi. Zack alerts Nomi that Carver is there, Nomi tells Molly. Zack introduces Carver to Nomi, who almost immediately makes an inappropriate advance on Nomi, not even noticing Molly clearly behind her. Nomi introduces Molly, who then splits off with Carver while Zack makes an advance on Nomi. What occurs is a strategic 'pairing off' that could have easily gone another way. It signifies the nadir of an industry predicated on sexual exploitation. Nomi has gained so much only to have gained nothing at all. The men around her can still freely make salacious remarks to her with impunity relative to their wealth and power, and her own wealth and privilege merely means that she is slightly safer from the ultimate imposition of patriarchal oppression. The scene is cruel, but it's ultimately necessary to drive home a point that, again, most actual sexploitation films stop just short of making - These environments of casual objectification, sexual harassment, and de-humanization are not cheeky, flattering, erotic, or refined. They are a vulgar, and systematic displays of patriarchal oppression that are merely 'pimped up' to look more elegant than they actually are. Not knowing how to feel about the scene in the context of Showgirls's rather aloof tone is, in my opinion, a zillion times more preferable to, say, something like the rape scene in Crank, where the event signifies absolutely nothing in terms of the progression of the plot or the character, and is staged for humorous effect.
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Mar 22, 2015 00:41
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