What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Man I loved cast a deadly spell in my youth. Haven't seen it in like 20 years but i have super fond memories of it.

I'm watching Society now, having gotten myself in an 80s horror mood. Never saw this one, but it sounds directly up my street.

Edit: Society was 70 minutes of boring clunky barely coherent 80s nonsense learning up to 20 minutes of bananas 80s latex fx. Not great, but entertaing enough I guess if you're a fan of gloopy 80s horror. I wasn't wowed but the climax was suitably ridiculous to be worth a watch.

I still haven't seen Cast A Deadly Spell. It's been medium-high on my list of things to watch for many years.

I'm not surprised that Society was clunker. I feel like there were a ton of bad movies in the '80s because there was a big increase in demand for movies and it was still relatively cheap to make a movie fast. Yes, there were also some great movies in the '80s.

What do you folks consider to be the worst decade for movies?

For US cinema? 90s, probably. TITANIC is the the peak of cinematic entertainment? Jeez. Everything seemed weirdly sanitized and saccharine: SHAWSHANK, FORREST GUMP, stuff like that. Lots of style, but not much advancing the industry.

Was this the decade PG-13 was determined to be the Money-Making Rating? That's probably part of it.

//rethinking: maybe 2000's? AVATAR is atrocious and it's insulting that it made so much money. I think the PG-13ification of everything really dialed up then. Adam Sandler movies, Pixar made a clunker (CARS). I basically stopped going to the movies once I had kids though, so I missed a lot here.

But Shawshank is #1 on imdb . . . because . . .

Big plus of Society was that it has this line, which had been cracking me up all day



The movie would have been fine if it had had some action in the first 70 minutes but there was just... Nothing. The payoff was to little too late.

Wow, Society...what a mess. Literally.
Oddly, when I saw Get Out it -really- reminded me of Society.

So back in the early 80s, my #1 fear was nuclear war. I was terrified by The Day After. And I remember hearing about Testament, a film about a woman and her kids struggling in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack. I always wanted to see it, but it kind of disappeared. It turned up on Amazon Prime so I finally got to see it.

Man, what a downer. It is definitely not the kind of funtimes postapocalypse thing we usually love.
It’s a pretty frank and fairly realistic film about not only this family but also their town, which isn’t destroyed because it’s far enough from big cities that it is more or less intact. But cut off, and dealing with the long term effects of fallout.

There are no effects, no sci fi elements. Most of what we see about the war is from a brief, interrupted newscast and a ham radio operator. It’s vague as to what is going on elsewhere.

There are some really chilling bits, like how they move forward with this school play to maintain a semblance of normalcy and another where kids find some dust on their breakfast plates. Death from radiation exposure becomes a matter of fact thing- disposing of corpses is dispassionate and remote.

What is really striking- even when the film gets a little too maudlin- is how life just sort of carries on. There are no mohawked punks in hot rods, no zombies, no mutants. Just regular folks struggling to stay alive with this THING that has happened to them.

There’s a great moment where the mom (a really great, Oscar-nominates performance) breaks down and just asks “who did this? Why?”

I thought it was quite good, but the Grave of the Fireflies level of grimness was pretty exhausting. Definitely a relic of a different time.

The Day After flat-out scared the shit out of people back then. Probably should be scary now; those warheads didn't just up and disappear.

Last night I showed my kids Bloodsport, which I had not seen in many years. They had never heard of JCVD, and one son's comment was "I don't like his face."

So, does this movie hold up? Yes and no. Unless you want to see '80s nonsense flashbacks and "comedy / romance" sequences, you would do well to fast-forward to just the fight sequences. Luckily, they are as awesome as ever. The kids loved them, and cringed appropriately at "that scene with the leg." They were also impressed with Bolo Yeung, of course.

It's on Amazon Prime if you want some nostalgia.

RobertB wrote: The Day After flat-out scared the shit out of people back then. Probably should be scary now; those warheads didn't just up and disappear.

The Day After -- there's a montage of scenes about the actual moment of blast that I still can see, in spite of seeing the film what, 35 years ago? As well as a scene with the ashfall with Jason Robards walking through the devastation. The film brought some scientific credibility as well which was uncommon for the day.

Back in the day of three networks a film like The Day After would capture 50%-75% market share, so you sure had something to talk about the next day. There's very few unifying products like that on television, and films don't hit the entire culture in a single evening. That said, the Internet lets you find the six other people around the world who just saw Roots for the first time last night and have a discussion with them.

Testament was something you needed to watch for maybe half an hour to understand the other half of the equation, the people out in the boonies that were overpassed by the bombs and needed to more or less ride out what remained of the civilazation as it was coasting to a stop. A life where when the oven breaks you may not be getting another one. You carry on until the cancer takes you. That one had impact on me as well.

Modern day we don't look at nuclear annihilation as a grave threat although it hasn't abated. It's just no longer red team/blue team, there's another dozen teams on the playing field and, as before World War I, everyone is trying to figure out who will jump onto which side when the shit goes down.

More importantly -- Jean Claude Van Johnson. Must see cinematic experience. Likely Jean Claude's best work (said with tongue filmy planted in cheek, but damn if it isn't true.)

I had nightmares from THE DAY AFTER, thanks Steve Gutenberg. Then I saw THREADS and that fucked me up all over again.

But those fears are largely assuaged. Nuclear weapons are genuinely so horrible it's difficult for me to comprehend any rational actor ever putting them to use. We and other keep electing irrational actors, and that's its own terrors, but I fear now more the inevitable demise of my way of life due to climate change (deservedly so), renewed baseless hatred of the other (I and my family are "other" in obvious ways), and technology moving at a pace that ethics can not keep up with (coupled with the lack of a social net able to support and defuse the most damaged among us.)

I watched IRON MAN with the kids last night. He kills like 50 guys.

jeb wrote: Nuclear weapons are genuinely so horrible it's difficult for me to comprehend any rational actor ever putting them to use.

I'll just mention that a nuclear launch was considered in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only reason a Soviet Navy submarine didn't launch was because the submarine's second-in-command balked the order. Considering the current low bar for world leaders, Khrushchev looks more than a bit presidential. Regardless, there are more than a few people in the world more or less with permission to launch if they think that they haven't heard from home recently.

I was a freshman in college when The Day After was on tv. Our dormitory scheduled a group discussion in one of the lounges for right after the show, so I watched the show and went to the discussion. I vaguely remember there was a lot of anxiety in the discussion, but I remember absolutely nothing the movie. I was a current events junkie at the time, and very interested in the Cold War, but the movie made zero impact on me.

Saw Men in Black International yesterday. It does so much right. Alien designs are great. Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the leads. Rather than recreate the worn veteran/cocky rookie dynamic of Jones and Smith, Hemsworth and Thompson are more slob/prep. It explores new corners of this particular universe.

But it just isn't funny. The best jokes were all in the trailers. I don't know whether it was the editing, the direction, the writing or something else entirely, but the jokes didn't land. Probably the writing. Even though the characters have clear identities, they still felt underdeveloped despite a two-hour runtime.

It's better than the second movie but still probably not worth watching.

I watched Bumblebee and Captain Marvel recently. They were both pretty good. Had some good moments. I like having more films with female heroes.

I saw Toy Story 4 over the weekend. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it.

The Great:
--As with most Pixar films and the TS series in particular, the animation was fantastic. They're always pushing themselves to new heights, and the lighting, textures, and surfaces here were amazing.
--The comedy was quite good. A lot of sight gags and clever moments. Forky is a lot of fun.
The Good:
--The script is well-crafted, but it kinda pulls in too many directions. It didn't feel like it had the same sharp focus of previous films.
--I had real trouble with Woody's arc in this movie, although I've come to appreciate it. Even though TS3 provided closure for Andy, this one tries to provide closure for Woody.
--There are a lot of great cameos throughout the movie; some recognizable, some requiring a post-credits look-up.
The Bad:
--Characters. Jessie is barely in the movie. Buzz seems to have had a lobotomy between films, suddenly losing all his development. Dolly, one of the "new" toys who leads Bonnie's group, starts off as a leader, and then is forgotten. All of the secondary toy characters are basically relegated to background extras.

That one bit of Bad really stood out to me. I've always been a huge TS fan, and to see the characters mishandled like that really struck a nerve. However, the film is still great. Even a mediocre Pixar movie is usually miles above anything else coming out.