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

Legomancer wrote: All that remains from the movie battle is the winner, Seven Samurai.

There is a great audio commentary on the Criterion disc (I don't know how you are watching these films) that I highly recommend if SS doesn't knock you down. The value of SS for me isn't just the awesome story, archetype characters, and the visuals, it's that this film PIONEERED a lot of that stuff. The framing and cinematography especially essentially redefined cinema, so much so that SS can seem kinda dull and tired now, but only because EVERYONE ELSE has been riffing from it for decades.

Can't say enough good things about the film personally, expectations set to low earth orbit!!

I'm watching them through my friend's Plex server. He apparently is still into pirating shit. But I don't like listening to commentaries anyway, so that's okay.

Erik Twice wrote: A friend of mine often complains that heroes have moved from being outside the system to being the system itself and I think that's unfair but he's not exactly wrong. (...)Second, sex has dissapeared from modern mainstream cinema.

I agree with your friend. Can't find it right now but there was an essay a couple of years ago arguing that the Marvel 'heroes' (who were originally conceived as power fantasies for nerdy weak kids) are just bullies today.
About the sex: frankly I don't miss the obligatory gratuitous sex scene of 80s action movies, neither 'damsel in distress' nor 'we just met five minutes ago, let's get it on'.

Nodens wrote: I agree with your friend. Can't find it right now but there was an essay a couple of years ago arguing that the Marvel 'heroes' (who were originally conceived as power fantasies for nerdy weak kids) are just bullies today.

They certainly get used for a lot of overt messaging, I guess whether or not you consider it "bullying" depends on whether or not you identify more with the vict....er target of supes. It's the poorly orchestrated strawman scenes where some hero needs to "prove their power" (be it physical or emotional) and so they get to knock down some really lazily set up targets that gets me now. Sure, in the before times this would have been some street gang, nosey neighbor, boorish boss, or whatever and its basically the same thing, but now it's just dumb.

Nodens wrote: About the sex: frankly I don't miss the obligatory gratuitous sex scene of 80s action movies, neither 'damsel in distress' nor 'we just met five minutes ago, let's get it on'.

I'll never miss a nice sex scene. I also miss that board room meetings, covert intel discussions, witness interrogations, and lunch were always in strip clubs

The "damsel in distress" aka DiD aka "Fridging about to happen" is just character economy IMHO. A really lean film can't flesh out every single character with their own motivations and desires up on screen. Guess what, Charlie Brewster needed to prove his vampire killing chops AND save a person (otherwise why not just burn the house down?) so guess what? Evil Ed, the friend, gets to be the sacrifice and Amy, the paramour, is the one he saves. She isn't so much a DiD as a macguffin to ensure there can even BE a final showdown.

Even fridging is just script shorthand. The audience needs a quick shot of hero empathy so there you go, kill his family/girlfriend/kid/dog, do a quick montage of watching the same video over and over, and BAM it's off to the violence!

Legomancer wrote: Watched The Big Sleep this weekend. Bogart and Bacall are great and there's a lot of fun but man I couldn't follow it. Partly because the sound on my PS5 was fucked up and I couldn't always hear it right and partly because I can never follow these twisty noir things, even though this one is comparatively straightforward. But jesus what a beautiful cast.

Nah, it wasn't you. The Big Sleep is notorious for not really adding up. A convoluted plot is almost a trope with Noir films. I would recommend The Long Goodbye (1973) and then The Big Lebowski (yes, really) as companion films to kind of get the vibe.

The increased violence and reduced sex has bothered me for a while as well. I think it's the combination of both happening that really gets me.

Just the other day I was watching the Harley Quinn animated series. Their friend, an unthawed Nora Fries, comes to visit, hoping to make up lost time down in New Orleans. Of course she takes her top off to get some beads, but they blur the animation. Now, I don't care whether I see animated nipples or not, but compared with the head-exploding (literally) violence and gore that happens every episode, it seemed really stupid.

I suppose that blurring it (rather than cropping the shot) was supposed to be some sort of satiric commentary, but it came across as dumb and puritanical. Eyeballs whacked out of their sockets with baseball bats? A-okay! Boobies? Not on my watch, mister!

Europeans consider Americans to be a bunch of violent prudes, based on our entertainment.

Violent Prudes is my new band name.

Gregarius wrote:

Legomancer wrote: Watched The Big Sleep this weekend. Bogart and Bacall are great and there's a lot of fun but man I couldn't follow it. Partly because the sound on my PS5 was fucked up and I couldn't always hear it right and partly because I can never follow these twisty noir things, even though this one is comparatively straightforward. But jesus what a beautiful cast.

Nah, it wasn't you. The Big Sleep is notorious for not really adding up. A convoluted plot is almost a trope with Noir films. I would recommend The Long Goodbye (1973) and then The Big Lebowski (yes, really) as companion films to kind of get the vibe.

Or The Maltese Falcon. Makes up for its lack of Bacall with additional Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.

Shellhead wrote: Europeans consider Americans to be a bunch of violent prudes, based on our entertainment.

Thus the saying a Tasmanian friend said to me once: "Thank God you got the Christians and we got the convicts."

Shellhead wrote: Europeans consider Americans to be a bunch of violent prudes, based on our entertainment.

We don't consider Americans to be violent, per se, but we do consider them to be overly prudish and have extremely strange standards about violence, sex and nudity.

A couple days ago I was watching The Boys with my girlfriend and the show suddently had warnings about sensitive content. She told me that they had been given the green light to do as they pleased and they had taken the chance to do something even more shocking than the constant, pointless gore that defines the show. Well, the episodes went by and we saw nothing shocking. I guess some people get blown up? But it's nothing we haven't seen before.

Turns out, the issue is that there were some naked torsos in an orgy. Not even genitalia or sex sounds. Just good ol' titties. For comparison, this is about the same level of nudity as The Triplets, a show for children under 10 years old. I guess we recognized the orgy as the typical edgy nonsense but the actual nudity didn't even register.

--

Personally, the biggest issue is that this puritanism is both being exported and applied as the norm. There's a huge pressure to follow the same standards, for example, for what counts as "oversexualization" and much of the "social justice discourse" I see in Spanish Twitter is lifted straight from the US. I try to push a bit against it, but gaming doesn't really offer many opportunities to do so.

Nodens wrote: I agree with your friend. Can't find it right now but there was an essay a couple of years ago arguing that the Marvel 'heroes' (who were originally conceived as power fantasies for nerdy weak kids) are just bullies today.

This is one of the reasons I despise Kingsman. The entire film is a bully fantasy where a poor boy becomes stereotypically rich so, at the end of the movie, he can beat a bunch of stereotypical British low class trash and feel justified doing so.

I'm just tired of writers coming up with increasingly contrived situations to explain why it's good and justified to kill a dozen people, be them Russians, drug addicts, Trump supporters or any other nonsense.

ChristopherMD wrote: Violent Prudes is my new band name.

But would you really want to be confused with The New Americans?


So, I had a bit of luck: My 14 year old wanted to watch a film and so whilst perusing HBOMax’s selections the Divergent series of films came on. We watched the first, she fell asleep. I felt the need to watch them all just for completion’s sake and I can’t sleep anyhow, so I turn on what I believed to be the next one based on the displayed order.

Turns out I skipped the middle one, and only watched the bookends. I’m really glad that happened, because those films were really, really bad.

Midnight Chronicles, aka "Christians Folly" is on Amazon prime!!!

So now you can see what inspired lord of the rings, the hobbit, game of Thrones, and Rings of Power (it was even first to have a black elf!). Truly a classic of our time now available t for every in enjoy in STUNNING 480p resolution and mono sound! To think Bezos tossed away b-b-billion dollars chasing Tolkien when this treasure was right there for pennies I tell you, pennies (my legal team has received notice from FFG that Midnight rights costs at least a dollar and to cease and desist from devaluing the IP).

Every time the notions of "acceptable in American film" come up I recommend people track down This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a 2006 documentary about the MPAA Film Review board. It's comprised of fewer people than actively post on this forum, who don't adhere to their own standards for membership.

This was fifteen years ago, but clearly the film industry has become more transparent and trustworthy since then, right?

Basically a few people say "violence okay, boobies bad" and world media follows along. Extend that trend out over a few decades, and here we are.

(I checked, and of course it's not available for streaming on any of the major networks... ha.)

Thor Love and Thunder dropped on Disney+

It's. . . not the worst Thor movie out there. . .