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

Finally got around to seeing Knives Out: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2020/02/right-out.html

Um... no.

I rented Parasite on Amazon. This movie is very good, and is essentially about grifters putting one over on wealthy people. Things turn dark. Recommended.

hotseatgames wrote: I rented Parasite on Amazon. This movie is very good, and is essentially about grifters putting one over on wealthy people. Things turn dark. Recommended.

Best film I've seen this year, without question.

I still haven't seen the first two John Wick movies, but I saw the third one yesterday. Lots of action, lots of violence, good pacing, but the story is a bit rubbish. It's better if you just ignore the story and focus on the action. Oh, and the scenery is great, too. Surprisingly lush set dressing and lovely locations for a movie that is almost entirely focused on people killing people. Major cast, too, featuring Keanu Reeves, Hallie Berry, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick (The Wire), Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones), and Angelica Huston. It's an older cast, but still vital. There was also a very striking younger woman (Asia Kate Dillon) who looked instantly familiar, but it turns out that I have never seen her in anything before. At one point, Keanu drops a quote from The Matrix, though not in one of his scenes with Fishburne.

For World of Darkness fans, this is practically a vampire movie, only without vampires. Mostly urban environment, and everybody is wearing black. A blood hunt has been declared on Wick, and he seeks absolution from the Assamites. This movie is very big on the concept of boons, which are always physically represented in the form of various talismans. His friends, the Ventrue primogen and the Nosferatu primogen, have been endangered by his actions, so he seeks to return and fight for them.

Shellhead wrote: I still haven't seen the first two John Wick movies, but I saw the third one yesterday. Lots of action, lots of violence, good pacing, but the story is a bit rubbish. It's better if you just ignore the story and focus on the action. Oh, and the scenery is great, too. Surprisingly lush set dressing and lovely locations for a movie that is almost entirely focused on people killing people. Major cast, too, featuring Keanu Reeves, Hallie Berry, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick (The Wire), Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones), and Angelica Huston. It's an older cast, but still vital. There was also a very striking younger woman (Asia Kate Dillon) who looked instantly familiar, but it turns out that I have never seen her in anything before. At one point, Keanu drops a quote from The Matrix, though not in one of his scenes with Fishburne.

For World of Darkness fans, this is practically a vampire movie, only without vampires. Mostly urban environment, and everybody is wearing black. A blood hunt has been declared on Wick, and he seeks absolution from the Assamites. This movie is very big on the concept of boons, which are always physically represented in the form of various talismans. His friends, the Ventrue primogen and the Nosferatu primogen, have been endangered by his actions, so he seeks to return and fight for them.

The first one was excellent, the second a little overdone in terms of endless action sequences. The third one falls in between . Halle Berry and her dogs are fun to watch. The action choreography is excellent in all three. There are some YouTube videos of Keanu and Berry doing weapons training and its pretty incredible the proficiency they develop. And Keanu, being the nice guy that he is, polices his own brass when he's done. There are countless stories of what a humble nice guy he is; he donated a HUGE chunk of his salary from the MATRIX sequels to give extra pay to the production crew.

Yesterday we had an impromptu Rutger Hauer film festival. We watched:
Blade Runner - Final Cut. I think this one is shorter than some other versions. Holds the hell up!

Night Hawks - Sly Stallone and Billy Dee Williams take down Rutger, international terrorist

Surviving the Game Rutger and friends, including Gary Busey, hunt down the most dangerous game, Ice - Muthafuckin' T. This film has the best scene Gary Busey has ever put to film, in which he tells the story of his childhood dog.

Msample wrote: 1917. Wow. Almost two hours seamlessly edited as a single cut. The cinematography is extraordinary.

Just got back from seeing this today, and “wow” is right. It is really astonishing how the single cut manages to move between feelings of intimacy and immediacy, to the vast panoramic scope of a war engulfing an entire country, and back.

I think a lot of ink will be spilled about the cinematography (and rightfully so) but the performances were really good as well. Humanizing and touching, extolling both the virtue and stupidity of duty and honor. War movies tend to hit a lot of the same beats these days, but I guess we deserve (as a species) to get hammered on the head until we learn our lesson.

If there is one criticism I’d make, it’s the questionable inclusion of Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s too big of a star, and not enough of an actor, to really play anything other than himself. The small role he plays is dwarfed by “oh, that’s Benedict Cumberbatch.”

We started watching Ma on HBO. This film is so poorly written that we turned it off after 15 minutes.

We then watched The Foreigner on Netflix. Jackie Chan is still getting it done!

Just saw Colossal which is being pushed heavily on Hulu right now.

It's excrement.

hotseatgames wrote: Yesterday we had an impromptu Rutger Hauer film festival. We watched:
Blade Runner - Final Cut. I think this one is shorter than some other versions. Holds the hell up!

Night Hawks - Sly Stallone and Billy Dee Williams take down Rutger, international terrorist

Surviving the Game Rutger and friends, including Gary Busey, hunt down the most dangerous game, Ice - Muthafuckin' T. This film has the best scene Gary Busey has ever put to film, in which he tells the story of his childhood dog.

Prince Henry Stout, FTW

Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon reached Netflix, so I forced my whole family to watch it. It's basically a sequence of hilarious physical comedy full of more or less hidden jokes for grownups and SciFi nods. Who needs dialogue anyway.

Finally saw The Outsiders. Never heard much about it, even when it was in theaters, but had some hopes for it. Francis Ford Coppola directed it, and the cast included Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Tom Waits. And yet it sucked. The performances by this strong cast are uniformly unimpressive. The plot is weak. The characters are not completely shallow, but close enough. For a movie about youth gangs fighting, the action primarily consists of guys simply trading punches to the gut. The whole movie seems corny and phony and ultimately pointless. Though released in 1983, it feels like a mediocre movie made in 1953. It's incredible that The Outsiders was directed by the same guy who directed The Godfather movies.

Consider a movie with a similar concept that was filmed just 4 years earlier, in 1979: The Warriors. The direct is nobody. None of the cast is famous. Less than half the budget of The Outsiders. And yet The Warriors is an incredible action movie. The characters generally talk and act like real people of their time. The gang outfits are distinctive. The stuntwork and fight choreography is very good, and has a gritty, visceral quality. There are some very quotable lines, and the speech at the gathering of the gangs was riveting.

The book on which The Outsiders is based is from 1967, so you're not entirely wrong.

Not that anyone probably had any real hopes for this, but Fantasy Island, while it had some promise with a horror premise, is really too garbled to have any entertainment or shlock value. It's just twist on twist, none of which is interesting.

We read the novel in highschool and also had to watch the movie. It's set in the early 1960s in Tulsa -- so I would expect it to be different than gangs in NYC in the 70s that The Warriors show. Considering it was written by a 16 year old, I think it's not too bad and captures the notion of "gangs" at the time (similar to Grease).

Shellhead wrote: Consider a movie with a similar concept that was filmed just 4 years earlier, in 1979: The Warriors. The direct is nobody.

I'm not sure I'd call Walter Hill a "nobody", but certainly not well known. Of his directorial efforts, I'd recommend:

The Driver
The Warriors
The Long Riders
Southern Comfort
Johnny Handsome

I'm not a fan of Streets of Fire but many others are, so you might want to consider that as well.