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

I'd say that most of the best horror movies use horror in the service of exploring some larger matter. The Night House arguably works better as a study of grief and its resolution rather than a "pure" horror movie, but even so, while the movie dips into fairly common haunted-house tropes, it's still capable of some legitimate scares and is soundly anchored by Rebecca Hall's anguished performance. Definitely worth a look.

HBO Max declared Saturday to be Batman Day, and I was fine with that. I was doing some yardwork and outdoor projects all day, so I periodically took breaks to watch Bat-stuff. The best of the day was the movie-length cartoon Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (2010), which was an adaptation of Grant Morrison's excellent JLA: Earth 2. The results are great, featuring work by some of the top people who worked on Batman: the Animated Series and the excellent Justice League cartoon of the mid-'00s, including Bruce Timm, Dwayne McDuffie, and Andrea Romano.

Both this movie and the original comic feature the Justice League battling their evil dopplegangers from an alternate Earth. That kind of story has a high risk of focusing on my least favorite type of superhuman battle: a good guy fighting a bad guy with the exact same power set. Fortunately, writer McDuffie sidesteps this for as long as possible, featuring more interesting asymmetrical battles between a wider range of characters. The larger cast might be daunting for a viewer who has not read many DC comics, but the focus stays on just six heroes and their counterparts. Some interesting ideas are actually presented, and the final battle offers both physical battle and a philosophical conflict. Though nowhere near as good as Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (five out of five stars), Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is pretty good (four of out of five stars), easily better than most superhero cartoons of any length. It's worth watching if you like superhero stuff, and it is highly recommended if you enjoyed either the Batman cartoon of the early '90s or the Justice League cartoon of the mid-'00s.

Shellhead wrote: A woman that I was dating in the late '90s made me rent The Bridges of Madison County so we could watch it on VCR at my place on Valentine's Day night. I was pleasantly surprised that it was a decent date movie. Clint may have set a record for oldest male to star in a romantic movie. It wasn't a great movie, but it was good, and Eastwood's direction was part of what made it good.

That's gotta be Nicholson in "Somethings Gotta Give", right? Maybe they are tied

Ewww, this is like thinking about grandparents having sex....

jpat wrote: I'd say that most of the best horror movies use horror in the service of exploring some larger matter. The Night House arguably works better as a study of grief and its resolution rather than a "pure" horror movie, but even so, while the movie dips into fairly common haunted-house tropes, it's still capable of some legitimate scares and is soundly anchored by Rebecca Hall's anguished performance. Definitely worth a look.

Agreed. It is very hard to maintain the tension of a good horror film throughout so supplanting the horror with a social message is a good way to transition from "fear of the unknown" to "fear of these consequences". Take slasher films. The older ones were often about social vice and how that leads to getting disembowelled mid coitus. But I was watching the most recent F13th and there is none of that, just dull murders without much of a reason to care. The shock of gore/horror has to be paired with introspection on oneself.

jason10mm wrote:

Shellhead wrote: A woman that I was dating in the late '90s made me rent The Bridges of Madison County so we could watch it on VCR at my place on Valentine's Day night. I was pleasantly surprised that it was a decent date movie. Clint may have set a record for oldest male to star in a romantic movie. It wasn't a great movie, but it was good, and Eastwood's direction was part of what made it good.

That's gotta be Nicholson in "Somethings Gotta Give", right? Maybe they are tied

Ewww, this is like thinking about grandparents having sex....

What about Walter Matthau in “Grumpy Old Men”? I think Matthau was born 45 years old.

Gregarius wrote:

jason10mm wrote:

Shellhead wrote: A woman that I was dating in the late '90s made me rent The Bridges of Madison County so we could watch it on VCR at my place on Valentine's Day night. I was pleasantly surprised that it was a decent date movie. Clint may have set a record for oldest male to star in a romantic movie. It wasn't a great movie, but it was good, and Eastwood's direction was part of what made it good.

That's gotta be Nicholson in "Somethings Gotta Give", right? Maybe they are tied

Ewww, this is like thinking about grandparents having sex....

What about Walter Matthau in “Grumpy Old Men”? I think Matthau was born 45 years old.

I was sure you were right, but looked it up and Matthau was only 63 in Grumpy Old Men. Eastwood was 65 in Bridges of Madison County. Nicholson was 66 in Something's Gotta Give, so he is the winner so far. Somebody will probably dig up some foreign film with an even older male romantic lead. For female actors, I am guessing that Ruth Gordon was the oldest, at age 75 in Harold and Maude. Yes, she was born in the 19th century!

If you asked me the ages of everyone in "Coccoon" I would have said 70-80s. But it think they were all 50s and early 60s. Folks just aged different back then.

jason10mm wrote: If you asked me the ages of everyone in "Coccoon" I would have said 70-80s. But it think they were all 50s and early 60s. Folks just aged different back then.

There’s a meme that says, “Paul Rudd is now the same age Wilford Brimley was in Cocoon” with side by side pictures. He was always old.

Speaking of horror and the need to transition it to exploring larger issues, The New Mutants (inexplicably on HBO max instead of any Disney service) does this rather well. This is the much delayed and rewritten "horror" mutants film and for about 2/3rds of it that concept works REALLY well, both because mutant abiltiies can manifest in horrifying ways and the (well, my) standards for horror films is much lower so I can tolerate spotty acting, workmanlike directing, and a sketchy plot in service to the chills.

And chills it has. Set in a creepy institution, full of nightmarish manifestations of theoretically mutant powers, but really inner demons about guilt, remorse, shame, and rage. All these young mutants display the classic "puberty equals unbridled and uncontrollable power" tropes familiar to countless YA properties but there is enough adult tone in there to satisfy me, and I usually run from YA. The coyness around what, in an earlier era of R rated films that just happen to feature teens, would have been a titillating shower scene or a steamy pool encounter kinda highlights the difficult tightrope many films today have to tread.

The 'doctor' (motivations unclear?) trying to help these lethal kids navigate the torturous and murky path from innocent childhood to uncompromising maturity while often saddled with incredible fatal baggage is easily recognizable to any parent. I used to identify with the rebellious kids in these films, now I sympathize with the exhausted adults just trying to keep them from scorching half the planet when their tiktok vid doesn't get enough likes

The film is unlike any major superhero film, maybe Brightburn is the closest. It shares more with Freaks or all the psionic horror films from back in the day like Scanners. So set expectations more towards horror and less flashy, over produced, capesuit action. But it does have some of that stuff and until it devolves into YET ANOTHER CGI battle at the end, the displays of power and how they actually might rend flesh is amazing and terrifying.

Not sure how this would have integrated into the larger x-men mutant universe as it was initially intended. Logan is actually somewhat close enough in tone that that Wolverine could exist in the new mutant world. But when the 2 most explained powers actually attribute most of it to "magic" kinda undermines the concept IMHO, but then again most mutant powers make little sense from any DNA or biological aspect.

Watched The Matrix again the other day, with my wife and daughter. You can do MST3K on The Matrix, but it's still a really good movie. I still think that humans in pods work better as CPU's a'la Hyperion, but I can swallow that. And it took 20+ years of watching The Matrix before I got why Switch called Neo "coppertop".

jason10mm wrote: Speaking of horror and the need to transition it to exploring larger issues, The New Mutants (inexplicably on HBO max instead of any Disney service)

Pretty sure Disney washed their hands of this one when they bought the 20th Century Fox studio, and putting it on Disney+ was probably seen as potentially confusing since Disney had its own plans for the X-material.

I finished watching the Harry Potter movies. The tone kept getting darker, but it wasn't dark enough for me until the two-part finale, The Deathly Hallows. I realize that I was never the target audience for this series, and I harbored some resentment for Rowlings ripping off Neil Gaiman's Tim Hunter from The Books of Magic comic book. But I did find Harry and his two friends to be likeable enough to endure 8 movies of shouty exposition, gratuitous cgi, and sloppy plotting. Still, the setting never really made cohesive sense to me, with the elephant in the room being the primacy of muggles society despite the significant power of the wizards. By the final movie, the archvillain has assembled an army of dark wizards, giants, and monsters, all in service of taking over a wizard school when he could be trying to rule the world.

I haven't read the books, but I expect that Rowlings is a windy writer who crammed her books full of details that didn't make the transition to the big screen. That must be why millennials are always talking about Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs when they are almost entirely ignored in the movies aside from the Sorting Hat scene. That would also explain why the movies often feature abrupt and underexplained plot twists. Still, it was weird how the 7th movie really builds up the idea of three magical artifacts known collectively as The Deathly Hallows, and then proceeds to completely ignore two of them to focus on a really powerful magic wand.

Harry Potter is pretty shit. Rowling is terrible at world building, forecasting, and pacing. The films do what they can.

Still, I have high hopes for a "Mists of Avalon" type story about Hermione and how she is really a John LeCarre style spy used by the mugglw world to infiltrate and destabilize the magic world. Think about it. Her parents are DENTISTS, as if such a thing existed in England, she subverted a major labor force for wizards by freeing the house elves, uses Harry as a patsy for all her schemes, and gains control of all the major magical artifacts for her own use. She is the perfect sleeper agent!

Yeah, I think that’s a pretty spot-on assessment. Rowling is good at characterizations and emotional beats, and her writing is okay. I read them all when they came out (worked in a bookstore at the time, it was pretty much a job requirement). They are entertaining in the moment but all the actual magic stuff is cornswaddle. It’s like Rowling thought of a thing, thought it would make for a cool scene, and put it in.

And only later (usually in the next book) tried to think through the ramifications of what a world with that thing would actually be like, then tried to explain away why that thing wouldn’t make her world boring, dumb, or broken. With almost universally unsatisfying results.

Jeeze. I thought the writing was the best part. She can turn a phrase. I thought that's why the movies came off flat.