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Community service announcement: if anyone feels the urge to watch the sci-fi movie High Life on Netflix, don't. It's one of the most execrable wastes of time I've ever had the misfortune to watch. It has two settings: dull, and relentlessly unpleasant, which it switches between without rhyme or reason. The mumbled dialogue is stilted and unnatural. The characters have no clear motivation, and the premise and setting of the movie is so poorly conveyed through the action and dialogue that there are several scenes and voiceovers that have been clearly shoehorned in during the editing process to try to patch the gaps. They did not succeed. The director is clearly unable to distinguish between 'controversial' and 'gratuitous'. It's unbelievably pretentious and extremely undeservedly so. This is not the kind of bad movie that you can watch in order to enjoy the trainwreck factor. This is worse than The Room. This is worse than the 2017 remake of Dirty Dancing. This makes Ed Wood look like James Cameron. There is no joy to be found in its badness, just a series of increasingly weary utterances of "oh for gently caress's sake" every time the bar is lowered until you wonder whether it's possible to die simultaneously from boredom and disgust. It's the worst movie I've ever seen.
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Jul 5, 2020 14:54
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Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) Probably the most gorgeous, visually sumptuous and strikingly well-shot film that I've ever strongly disliked. Went into this one with slight trepidation as the (trailer-revealed) plot hook of Geppetto having and then losing a child prior to Pinocchio's creation smacked of unnecessarily injecting maudlin tones into the story. Then about 10 minutes in to the film there was an amazing sequence with Geppetto crafting Pinocchio in a decidedly Frankensteinian manner, the blue fairy straight-up being biblically-accurate-angel-inspired, and Pinocchio revealing himself in an incredibly unsettling manner, moving inhumanly and leading off with "You wanted me to live. You asked for me to live!", and I was on board for what looked like it would shape up as a dark fantasy Pinocchio-as-cryptid movie... until the first of several intensely forgettable and twee musical numbers started and the film ground to a halt. (Seriously though, if you have a Netflix account watch from 13:20 - 20:50, and then pretend that the film maintained that tone and energy for the remainder and don't bother with the rest.) Broadly, the trouble with this film is that it's bloated and crammed with a number of hooks that by themselves could have acted as the central fulcrum of a movie by itself, and which when combined together serves to make the whole less than the sum of its parts. Setting it in fascist Italy was a bad move and the plot line that came from that was unsatisfying and essentially led nowhere with nothing to say other than "hey, remember when I did Pan's Labyrinth?" (also I did NOT loving need to see Geppetto give a roman salute, thank you very much), Ewan McGregor's performance as the cricket was grating, and seeing Pinocchio literally being crucified was so on the nose it drew a hearty audible "oh for gently caress's sake" from me. The film also had a bunch of points that seem like nitpicks but really should have been within del Toro's capacity to catch and fix: Geppetto looking unchanged between the death of his son in WWI, when he carved Pinocchio around what had to have been about 10 years later at least (given the growth of the tree) and his own death after WWII for example - he looked ridiculously old to have a 9-year-old boy in the outset, why not at the very least change the colour of his hair and beard for that section? Also the puppeteer finding Pinocchio at the end out of nowhere at precisely the climactic moment was just clumsy. Ultimately the biggest issue is that the film got the character of Pinocchio completely rear end-backwards. In the original story he's a rotten little turd with zero impulse control who constantly gets himself mired into bad situations because of his temperament and who has to very slowly and painfully get it through his thick wooden head that he needs to be a good boy before his character arc is over and he earns redemption. In this film he at worst acts out of ignorance for the first few minutes he's on screen, and every thing that he does for that point onwards is motivated by a desire to be a good son - it's Geppetto in this version who is the weak link in their father-son dynamic. The movie still acts as if he's earned his redemption to become a 'real boy' by the end, but seeing as he's done nothing but be a 'good boy' from practically the beginning this arc lands like a wet fart. There's been such a glut of Pinocchio movies lately, but none of them have seemed to have tackled the original text very well. (I heartily recommend KC Green's webcomic adaptation of the original story as it's frankly delightful and extremely close to the original story.) Frankly the most transgressive thing that a studio could do would be to film a version that was exactly reflective of the original story - right down to Pinocchio straight-up murdering the cricket with a hammer on their first meeting. Sadly I think that the specter of Disney's original Pinocchio looms a little too large in the general public consciousness though.
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Dec 16, 2022 03:01
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Carillon posted:In the followup day we did: May be an insufficient bongrips issue, frankly.
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Jan 1, 2023 05:05
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Pope Corky the IX posted:I think it's already been mentioned but Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is actually really loving good and better than any expectation I had, especially for a DreamWorks movie. And the design of the Big Bad Wolf genuinely terrifying for a kids film. A couple of animated movie studios have really redeemed themselves as of late. Sony brought us the excreable emoji movie but then dropped spider verse out of nowhere and followed up with Mitchells vs the machines, and we watched The Bad Guys last night, and it was just a really enjoyable and fun little movie that got a surprising number of laughs out of me, and had really good art direction.
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Jan 6, 2023 00:55
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Avatar 2: aquatic boogaloo: an undeniably pretty film with spectacular visuals and amazing world design, but with paper thin plot and characterisation, and horribly clumsy dialogue, exposition and motivations. Cameron used to be great, but he's disappeared up his own rear end in a top hat and it's a real pity. Exactly what Scorsese would characterise as being a theme park ride rather than an actual movie I'm sad that he's succumbed to late career self indulgence because Cameron used to be my favourite director. Everything everywhere all at once: Tremendous. Went into this completely blind and didn't know what to expect, and then that feeling never left me until the final seconds of the film. I am completely stunned that a film like this could be made, especially for it's comparatively miniscule budget, and the level of creativity on display is awe inspiring. Quite possibly the silliest film to ever deeply move me and a stunning example of tonal dissonance done absolutely right
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Jan 8, 2023 11:01
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Pope Corky the IX posted:To be fair, Quantum of Solace was an absolute mess and a hell of a comedown after Casino Royale. It was utterly joyless and had the worst-shot car chase of any movie I've ever seen. Just an array of lovely cuts with no rhyme or reason
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Jan 26, 2023 11:02
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Hollismason posted:Frankenhooker Hahaha holy poo poo what the gently caress did I just watch In an entertaining way?
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Feb 20, 2023 05:45
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Mantis42 posted:I'm the exact opposite. 2 is easily the best and 3 is the worst, far too dour ino Absolutely and a lot of that comes down to the villain. High evolutionary was kinda meh, and kicking around a bunch of cute animals like in 3 is a cheap and lazy way to get heat on a character, but "it broke my heart to put that tumour in my head* in 2 was amazing and got a bunch of audible gasps and one full volume "you motherfucker" in the theatre I was in.
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May 8, 2023 01:36
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Across the Spider-Verse Clearly the best looking animated movie of all time, and the gap isn't even close. Amazing film, and it's raised the bar for animation in a way that is going to make it very difficult to match.
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Jun 20, 2023 12:35
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John Wick 4 Yeah, nah. This is a supreme jump the shark moment and I'm glad the series is over and not because it was any kind of satisfying conclusion. John is about as invincible as a looney tunes character. I can suspend disbelief in regards to a bulletproof suit, fine,but at least getting shot in previous films had impact. It actually hurt. There were consequences Now it's something you shrug off like a mosquito bite. John gets hit by cars what feels like a half a dozen times. He jumps off of a second story and hits a van on the corner of the roof so hard that it dents the frame in by a foot. He shrugs it off with all of the blase indifference of a superpowered comic book character. Making your action movie hero tough is one thing, but this was ridiculous to the point of eliciting laughter. I'm reminded of the ridiculous amount of plot armour John McLain got in the latter die hard movies. Not to mention that the whole broader world of assassins that JW2+ introduces has turned out to be completely lacking. 100% sizzle, no steak. You have a world where every second person seems to be an assassin, working for an organization that doesn't seem to do anything except arbitrarily kill and punish its own members. Each new movie in the series introduces a new aspect or tradition of this society that clearly only exists because the plot of that film in particular demands it, not because it's a well-crafted universe. There's just nothing of substance there. And the scenes where there's just a pitched battle going on in the middle of a nightclub with people dancing around and not raising an eyebrow while dozens of heavily armed mooks are shot, stabbed, and brutalized around them, like, directly within the crowd, are just naff. I don't know what they were going for but it didn't land. The entire universe they've crafted is a wet poo poo in a paper bag. Post-credit scene was a complete downer too, there's nothing like being told that actually all of that effort was for nothing to make you not care about a movie's stakes. At the end of the day it would have been a net gain for everyone involved if John had just put a gun in his mouth at the beginning of the first film and pulled the loving trigger. I'll give credit where it's due: the overhead shot action scene was really well shot, and definitely the highlight of the movie. But the rest was so terrible that it's kinda made me want to never see movies 2+ ever again. The first film stands up, but if you're going to introduce this lore filled world replete with assassins around every corner and end on this wet of a fart then consider my interest in anything subsequent killed.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:15
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The Batman (2022) gave me a new appreciation of Christopher Nolan's talent as a director.
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Jul 6, 2023 21:45
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Nimona is fantastic and you shouldn't sleep on it (which would admittedly be easy to do as it looks like one of a dozen animated films on Netflix). Seriously, watch it - despite a character's occasional forays into a touch of lolrandum comedy it's a really fun romp for the whole family. On the service it's a perfectly well-realised adventure and has a distinctive and beautiful animation style. It's also extremely Gay, with an amazing Trans allegory running through it and directly looks you in the eyes and tells you that it's not enough to fight individuals, but rather inequitable power structures need to be directly opposed. In a kid-appropriate movie. It has fuckin' layers.
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Jul 11, 2023 22:16
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Dr. Yinz Ljubljana posted:Asteroid City : a huge cast can't solve the main problem I have with this, which is that it's just a touch too far up its own rear end. I understand it's Wes Anderson doing his own semi-autobiographical but also not kind of play-within-a-play thing and it's about grief and loss and also the weirdness of making anything creative, but it's also a group of people witnessing the absurd/otherworldly and trying to deal with it. The point of comparison I had was Nope, but whereas Nope was straightforward, this seems to wrap itself in Lynchian shell game stuff and it falls apart. Not bad, but certainly not Wes' best film in years, that was The French Dispatch Wes Anderson's films tend to have absolutely amazing cinematography and I cannot deny his talent with the camera - the cutaway scene in The Life Aquatic was so beautiful I had to rewind and watch it multiple times. Fantastic Mr Fox was pretty much the best Dahl adaptation because it was shot in such a wonderfully unsettling manner. However it also remains the sole film of his that I would have any interest in seeing again because everything I have seen since then has been unwatchably performatively quirky garbage. He's got one note that he likes to play over and over again, and he plays it beautifully, but I just don't enjoy it. The kid from Rushmore holds the crown as the most thoroughly unlikable young person in a movie, eclipsing Ferris Bueller.
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Jul 19, 2023 23:11
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Data Graham posted:Big Trouble in Little China: somehow I never saw this until now, though I did see The Golden Child way back when and remember it being incomprehensibly unfunny. Amused that this is what it was up against in what had to be some weird case of pre-Volcano/Mars/Ant movie/space station TV show studio espionage. This one is a lot of fun and has plenty of good action and set design (and really good effects for the era too), and I dig the subversion of the macho white protagonist being a bumbling doofus who knocks himself the gently caress out before a fight scene. The bit in the lo pan psychic battle where he starts wiggling his thumbs like he's holding a game controller is a gag at least 20 years ahead of its time.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:56
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Carpet posted:A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013) I can't speak much to the sequel, but from your description it's pretty close to the first one in being somewhat muted and toothless. Saw the first Meg directly after seeing 2010's Piranha, and Piranha nailed every bit of what a movie of this type should be (a camp, gleefully gory b-movie) and was a better movie on every level. Also it has Christopher Lloyd in it and whose entire instruction from the director must have been "just do Doc Brown", and the best last stand ever with Ving Rhames.
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Aug 21, 2023 22:02
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The unbearable weight of massive talent answers the question "what if Birdman but good?"
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Sep 3, 2023 13:50
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Jeff Wayne musical version best version.
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Sep 11, 2023 07:55
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The creature's cries being "ULLA" because it's an ullulation is such a fantastic loving touch
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Sep 11, 2023 14:01
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mycot posted:Ex Machina was fun but I did think it was a little eyebrow raising that any thematic train of thought you might have been forming mid-movie about abuse and misogyny kinda gets thrown out the window when you get to The Twist. Could you elaborate on this a bit more?
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Oct 20, 2023 08:51
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Was my Girlfriend's first time watching The Magnificent Seven the other night, and the dawning realisation that The Three Amigos (one of her favourite comedies) wasn't just a genre parody but was a specific film parody was exquisite. Just a constant stream of variations of "What the gently caress, this is basically exactly the same film" as one of her childhood favourites was forever recontextualised. Great film, too, and a surprising amount of well-places moments of humour to relieve tension.
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Oct 27, 2023 21:06
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Nosferatu (1922): gently caress me rigid this was an amazing film in context. Second 1920's black and white silent German expressionistic film I've seen (first one is Metropolis because I'm a basic bitch) and so far it's 2 for 2 in the 'watch where whole swathes of cinematic language were first developed'. Remarkably good cinematography given the technological constraints they were working with, and Gustav von Wangenheim brings maybe a modicum more dignity to the role than Keanu did.  One thing I will say is that people lose their poo poo over the shot of Orlok's shadow ascending the stairs, but there's another absolutely phenomenal shot where he's casting a shadow in the room with Ellen, and you see the shadow of his hand move up her torso to where her heart is at which point his fist closes around it and she writhes - this got an audible gasp from my girlfriend and was a stunningly brilliant concept. Just leagues ahead of its time.
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Nov 1, 2023 09:05
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live with fruit posted:I vividly remember the movie in which a guy gets his heart ripped out and then it catches fire when his body is dipped in molten lava. Temple of Doom is the worst Indiana Jones film, definitely the one whose sensibilities have aged the most poorly, and barely makes sense, but it has the highest number of memorable, visually iconic, and striking sequences/set pieces in any film in the series.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:01
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Mat Cauthon posted:Ready or Not: wow this movie was loving great. Even knowing the premise going in I was still pleasantly surprised. Lots of cool little moments and interactions, good balance of scariness and humor, spot on casting and strong performances that really helped sell all the major beats. To my dying day I will maintain that a better ending would have been that there's nothing supernatural going on at all, it's just a bunch of rich jerks needlessly murdering people for no good reason because they're fuckwits who believe they're special. Just an anticlimax when the time passes, followed by slow creeping realisation that they are monsters who committed atrocities for no reason at all.
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Feb 3, 2024 07:17
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Bottoms(2023):Book Smart = Heathers:Mean Girls
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Feb 10, 2024 14:46
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Mega Comrade posted:I've been meaning to rewatch it with subtitles to see if that makes me not hate it. I watched it with subtitles the first time as I was forewarned, and let me tell you; the emperor has no clothes. The film's much-vaunted amazing complexity is 100% a failure to clearly communicate through the medium on the director's part, and Nolan's disdain for his audience has gone well over the line. Frankly with regards to the end of this film, I feel like the movie would have been a whole lot better with less runtime and lower stakes. The whole world-ending stakes part of the plot felt tacked-on, frankly, and if the climax of the film was changed to be defeating Sator during/shortly after the inverted airport scene in the quest to save Kat with the realisation that in the earlier airport scene the protag had been fighting himself as the climax, it would have probably elevated the film in my eyes to be at least moderately enjoyable as opposed to the huffing-its-own -farts slog that we got.
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Feb 24, 2024 21:49
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So after watching part one for the first time on the weekend and part 2 in cinemas last night my attitude has gone from "utter folly to even attempt, this is inherently unfilmable" to "need to watch it a bunch but Villeneuve's Dune is a contender for greatest science fiction film of all time". It's certainly one of the most visually gorgeous films I've ever watched.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:07
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Crocobile posted:Mad Max (1979): The only other Mad Max I’ve seen is Fury Road, so I was really surprised at how… normal? this one is. Also Max isn’t exactly “mad” until the final 15 minutes of the film. Be prepared for the biggest single jump in quality between films in a series. Seriously, MM1 is okay, largely from a historical perspective, but MM2 just absolutely nails the iconic formula.
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Apr 30, 2024 08:05
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The king of Camp superhero films has to be Batman and Robin. I have to say that I enjoyed it far more than Batman forever on rewatch, because Batman forever is completely ruined by Jim Carrey hamming it up way too loving hard whereas Batman and Robin at least leans into the camp and possibly the only criticism I have of it is that it would have been better if it leant harder.
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May 1, 2024 01:30
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Data Graham posted:The Road Warrior ...no attempt at worldbuilding... lol what the gently caress
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May 4, 2024 05:35
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