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

I've been wanting to catch Lamb for a while. It looks promising.

I watched Guy Ritchie's The Covenant recently. It was fine. Jake G. is always great. For some reason, the dialogue felt a little off at times. But the overall story and pacing was excellent.

I burned out on the rom-com formula many years ago, but I do enjoy the occasional anti-rom-com. How to Talk to Girls at Parties is many things, including a bold and subversive twist on the rom-com formula. A more descriptive title would be "How to Explain Punk to an Alien," and still only scrapes the surface of this sweet and deeply weird movie. It covers all the punk bases, starting with the time and place of London in 1977. Anarchy, stupidity, vomit, violence, vandalism, screaming. And then things get very strange. And sweet. The movie sprawls and tries to take on too much, but the emotional beats land well, and the ending is wonderful. I saw it on Max, but only after rummaging around in the menus for a half hour, looking for something different.

Shellhead wrote: I saw it on Max, but only after rummaging around in the menus for a half hour, looking for something different.

Oh man, this is my wife. She will troll menus ALL NIGHT looking for something, to the point where we could have just watched ANYTHING in that time. I try to keep some medium interest stuff in a watchlist for services that allow it just to limit this bad habit.

I'm still surprised that streamers haven't created "channels" of stuff like "80's action" (hosted by Dolph Lundgren) or "90's horror" with Robert Englund to limit choice and tug at some nostaliga heartstrings much like the TCM channel did. I know they have genre lists that basically do this, but I want a fixed playlist, you start late and you miss the opening act, make it feel like old school TV again!

I normally spend just 5 to 10 minutes maximum looking through menus, but it helps that I usually have a queue of future viewings lined up. Thanks to Zaslav's pennypinching, most of my Max queue got lost. Admittedly, I had low expectations for the Max rollout, so I have been focused for months on wrapping up various shows I was watching on HBO Max.

My only other pay channel right now is Amazon Prime, which I plan to keep indefinitely for the shipping benefits. But I have recently noticed that quite a few movies in my Amazon Prime queue have switched to a rent or buy option and are no longer free with Prime. I'm glad that the good times lasted so long throught the pandemic, but now that I actually have the disease, I have an increased interest in passive entertainment.

I finally watched Interstellar (2014) on Amazon Prime. Normally I am interested in everything Nolan directs, but this movie landed at a bad time during my life and I overlooked it. I am vaguely aware that the movie was critically-acclaimed, but I was somewhat disappointed. Great cast, good acting, strong concept, clearly influenced by both 2001 and 2011 (the movies based on the Arthur C. Clarke books). And the storytelling by Nolan has unusual clarity compared to his other movies.

But like all Nolan movies, Interstellar runs too long and wears out the welcome mat. 2 hours and 49 minutes literally felt like 4 hours to me, which is ironic considering how much time Nolan spent contemplating relativity during the making of this movie. Tightening up the pace early on would have helped, and the torturously slow exposition near the end should have been cleaned up. Studio exes would hate me for saying this, but a serious science-fiction show should never dumb itself down to the point where any idiot can appreciate it. There are already plenty of movies and tv shows aimed at idiots, including one extremely popular franchise that was launched in 1977 and continues to this day.

Pick up the pace, focus on the target audience, and lose the heavy exposition, and Interstellar could have been truly stellar. I'm not sorry that I watched it, but I know I won't watch it again.

I watch Akira about once a year. I finally upgraded from my DVD copy to a 4k blu ray that also included a standard blu ray. I have a 4k tv, and hooked up to it is an ordinary blu ray player and a Xbox Series X. The Xbox will play 4k Blu ray discs.

The 4k of Akira looks amazing. Everything is bright and crisp, it's just stunning. I watched for a while, and then became aware of a real problem with my setup. The xbox disc drive is loud as fuck. It was laying a constant wheheheheheheh over everything.

I eventually gave up on my sweet 4k version and watched the standard blu ray, which is perfectly quiet.

I think I need a new 4k blu ray player.

I'm actually considering a stand alone 4k hdr blue ray player just to get the best experience since streaming, while improved from the compression heavy early years, looks to start aggressive cost cutting which will surely lead to reduced image quality again.

As for Nolan, I think he has been on a progressive downward slide since...Inception or so, particularly Dark Kmight Rises to Interstellar to TENET, they are visually impressive but narratively obtuse and emotionally bereft films. I fear Oppenheimer will be even worse.

I enjoyed Extraction 2 on Netflix, it's a fun action film with a Ghost Recon Wildlands bent to it. Turn your brain off, enjoy the bang bang.

The first one was good, too.

Kind of an interesting double feature in Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing and Polite Society, two movies fully immersed in action tropes but with very different results.

To the extent Undisputed works (beside the excellent fight choreography and associated stunts) it is due to its complete acceptance of being B-grade action. Michael Jai White, a retired boxing champion, is falsely imprisoned to join an underground fighting ring, defeats its rage monster champion and becomes a better man in the process. It does nothing new but does it well and earnestly. There is no winking awareness or post-modern irony. It is what it wants to be. Not essential. Can be pretty well enjoyed in YouTube clips.

Polite Society was a surprise action comedy follow-up for Nida Manzoor from We Are Lady Parts. It touches on some of the same themes of romance and family through the lens of second or third generation Pakistani immigrants in London but is a very different beast. Punk music is replaced by Tarantino title cards and music drops and kung fu fight scenes. Unfortunately her film debut doesn’t work nearly as well as her series. Society exists in such a heightened state that I didn’t realize until well after the twist that there wasn’t going to be a Walter Mitty explanation for everything. Fight scenes were also a disappointment. It doesn’t feel great going from Scott Adkins hook kicks and kips to cutting on every punch to shoot around the stunt performers. The best bits were the lead just screwing around with her sister and school friends, material very much in Manzoor’s wheelhouse.

The Coen Brothers' 2016 film Hail, Caesar! is free on Tubi until midnight tonight, so I watched it, and it was terrible. Really boring, really pointless. They have been really hit-or-miss since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which was admittedly 20+ years ago)

fightcitymayor wrote: The Coen Brothers' 2016 film Hail, Caesar! is free on Tubi until midnight tonight, so I watched it, and it was terrible. Really boring, really pointless. They have been really hit-or-miss since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which was admittedly 20+ years ago)

Hail, Caeser is certainly among their weakest, but I still found it somewhat worthwhile.

In terms of their newer material, No Country For Old Men is fantastic.

It also may be an opinion shared by no one else, but I think Burn After Reading is one of their best films. I quote it regularly ("Is this Osborne Cox?" And "Do you have the spy shit?").

I thought True Grit was solid as well.

I agree that Burn After Reading is really quite good. The last 3 minutes is one of the funniest scenes in movie history:



"What have we learned, Palmer?"

True Grit was really well done. I was a little put off by it being a note-for-note remake, but the performances won me over, especially Hailee Stanfield.

charlest wrote:

fightcitymayor wrote: The Coen Brothers' 2016 film Hail, Caesar! is free on Tubi until midnight tonight, so I watched it, and it was terrible. Really boring, really pointless. They have been really hit-or-miss since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which was admittedly 20+ years ago)

Hail, Caeser is certainly among their weakest, but I still found it somewhat worthwhile.

In terms of their newer material, No Country For Old Men is fantastic.

It also may be an opinion shared by no one else, but I think Burn After Reading is one of their best films. I quote it regularly ("Is this Osborne Cox?" And "Do you have the spy shit?").

I thought True Grit was solid as well.

No Country and True Grit are both great.
Unfortunately the list of other post-OBrother films includes:

The Man Who Wasn't There (limp homage to film noir)
Intolerable Cruelty (romantic comedy dreck)
The Ladykillers (a waste of a good Tom Hanks)
Burn After Reading (too goofy)
A Serious Man (nebulous & unappealing)
Inside Llewyn Davis (boring and brown, but it had a cat)
and Hail, Caesar (flat, hollow, pointless)

The only one I'll argue in that list is The Man Who Wasn't There. I thought it was great, even if it did have weak points. Yeah, a lot of the rest of those really didn't hit the same heights that they had in the 90s. I still think Miller's Crossing is their best film.

Not usually my style to just post stuff I found elsewhere, but I found this review of the new Spiderverse movie most insightful for its scope and perspective.
Some spoilers and a lot of things worth considering, even if you don't agree with all of it. Money quote: This movie is comic book authenticity.

Wes Anderson's latest, Asteroid City, really doesn't need a review -- if you're a fan of his work, you're going to see it and if you're not, you won't (and shouldn't to be honest).

It's not going to convert any non-believers and may be his least essential movie yet. I found the framing device of "the movie is an imagining of the play" to be mostly tedious with the exception of the self-aware "I don't understand what it's all about" anguish one of the actor's expresses near the end. I took it to be the director's way of saying "No, there's no real point or meaning to any of this, just let it happen."