No.827 KONTRA
Set in the 30s in a fictional Central European country of Zubrowka, the film tells the story of Monsieur Gustave H., the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel, and lobby boy Zero Moustafa, his protégé. One day Monsieur Gustave finds out about the death of one of his clients and one of his numerous lovers, countess Desgoffe und Taxis. He travels together with Zero to her estate in Lutz to pay his respects, but finds himself in a dispute over the inheritance with Dmitri, countess' only son, and then ends up blamed for countess' death, who was actually poisoned. Now a fugitive, he needs to clear his name, and, with Zero's help get to the bottom of the matter of countess' demise.
It's a very good adventure/dark comedy film. The plot is not particularly sophisticated, but nonetheless not boring, the performances are great (Ralph Fiennes' in particular, who played Monsieur Gustave), the score is very nice (and unusually subtle for an American production which often go for some orchestral shit full of pathos), the scenery is beautiful (from snowy mountain forests to narrow streets of a Central European town, it evokes the feeling of coziness), and overall the film seems really polished. Also of note actors with pretty big names — Jude Law, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray — playing really small roles. To their credit, they still took these roles seriously (as seriously as possible for a dark comedy often bordering on eccentric or even absurd), especially Jeff Goldblum, who was unexpectedly good as Deputy Kovacs. Overall, it was a good watch.
No.830
I recently started watching The Last of Us series but thought it was meh after two episodes so I decided to finish watching the 4th-6th Resident Evil movies instead to scratch the zombie apocalypse itch.
They're surprisingly actually good. Pretty campy for sure and the story gets retconned at the beginning of each movie but the action is really well directed (as opposed to the 2nd and 3rd movies which were not directed by Paul WS Anderson) and Milla Jovovich is just really perfect at embodying the badass heroine.
>>827The Grand Budapest Hotel has been ruined for me a bit since it's always featured in all those movie aesthetics youtube video essay stuff because it has such a distinct visual style.
No.834
>>830>The Grand Budapest Hotel has been ruined for me a bit since it's always featured in all those movie aesthetics youtube video essay stuffYou mean like you've watched so many videos about it before watching it that you've lost any interest in it? Or you just dislike those creative arts youtuber pricks? Anyway, aesthetics is not the only thing that the movie has going for it. The most enjoyable thing for me was Monsier Gustave's character and Ralph Fiennes' brilliant performance as him. This alone makes the movie worth watching.
No.871
Already mentioned it on /b/, but since there's a dedicated movie/TV threda here: By chance I watched some episodes of M*A*S*H* recently. I didn't know anything about the series and initially thought it was just another old forgettable series, but I was wrong. It actually was a huge success in the USA back in the 70s/80s, and for 27 years or so held the record for biggest audience ever with its final episode 1983, it was only beaten by the Super Bowl 2010. the series is about a medical army unit in the korean war, and it's half comedy, half serious, basically it's showing how some civilian doctors got recuited for army service against their will to aid the wounded soldiers behind the front lines, so most episodes take place solely in their small camp. I think it's mainly the great cast who makes this a good watch, despite some changes over the years they always had very good chemistry and they show very well how people would cope with the horrors of war by employing sarcasm and humour, but also showing cracks in their psyche at times. Especially Alan Alda in his role of chief surgeon "Hawkeye" Pierce does an incredible job of being funny while also showing how much it gets to your nerves when you permanently have to patch up heavily wounded soldiers with limited chances of success.
It's especially interesting since despite the series is about the Korea war, it started out while the Vietnam war was still on, so they had to walk the line between showing the horrors of war while not being openly outspoken against the war, since that would have meant problems with the government. Now I try to watch every afternoon during home off when I have spare time.
No.874
Also been delving into Hong Kong movies recently a bit more, a director I've come to really enjoy is Johnnie To. Makes some of the coolest crime thrillers with compelling characters and god tier visual direction. This scene's so good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B5BLcLGN1w>>834>dislike those creative arts youtuber pricks?This, it's just kind of a low hanging fruit to analyze Wes Andersons style imho.
I've actually seen it when it came out but don't remember it that well.
>Monsier Gustave's character and Ralph Fiennes' brilliant performance as him. This alone makes the movie worth watching.I agree, Fiennes is great for sure, he manages to elevate pretty average movies just by his presence, i.e. The Menu from last year
No.875
I'm still wondering if those recent greek (weird) cinema is maybe available for stream somewhere in the depths of the internet. There are some oddballs that are lesser known than the Lanthimos stuff.
>>874>PTUI remember this one, my mum rented it from the DVD rental place for me and I burned it on a DVD-R with the help of DVDshrink or or whatever that crack and shrink program was called. I was disappointed by it (was 14-15, dunno) and I cannot tell how on earth I came across this so I thought I have to see this movie.
Probably in some list or forum.
No.876 KONTRA
>>827>The Grand Budapest HotelI always wonder, do Europeans feel a sense of being objectified by Americans' unsophisticated infatuation with an imagined belle époque old Europe, or do they secretly feel flattered, like some Japanese by weeabooism.
Since many ernsts already share my dislike towards Hesse, maybe I'm not be the only one who got irritated by the Zweig-esque kleinbürgerliche Weltanschauung, which is much worse. I think Wes Anderson never clicks with me. Every time I fail to find any depth beneath the over-stylized cinematography. There's a scene in Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the hypercompetent (to borrow brick's terminology), prideful of his own adventure spirit, made-for-audience-to-self-insert Mr. Fox needs to do a simple multiplication, something like 3*7*11. Fox used his fingers, thought for a few seconds and cheerfully got the answer while everyone else was in awe. This is what Wes Anderson deems impressive.
No.879
>>876Welld done, you have voiced my secretly brooding concern with Andersons work. I've read a piece of Zweig and felt an uneasiness like when you're at a family diner and one of your relatives - whom you generally respect and like - turns out to harbor a small core of deeply rooted fascism, and now you have to somehow find a way to treat this person "the right way".
There are four aspects to Anderson for me that somewhat even out: His cineastic craftsmanship and his genuine portrayal of damaged people are two things I value highly. The two things that irk me are 1) his infatuation with romanticised European bourgeois lifestyles of the past;
2) his american perspective on the world.
In Grand Budapest he tries to address the problem that lies within romanticising Europe of the 1930s, and in an admittedly elegant way he passes the problem on to the audience without taking a clear stance himself, by talking *about* the problem in a way that would at the same time sound agreeable to aging fascists and the modern american artist scene(s). "Conflict not resolved, but I made you like something aesthetically that reeks of rotten ideology."
Yes, when watching Andersons films now I feel like he is unable to see the Europe I live in behind the façade of romanticism. Which is precisely what monsieur Gustave represents, and why I still like Grand Budapest a lot; Anderson is self-critical while doubling down on the thing he is critical about.
Another problem I have with Anderson is that he seems like the epitome of humanism in modern cinema, which is at odds with my own development of slowly becoming detached from the humanist ideology.
Ironically his ode humanism is strongest and worst (for me) when he talks through animals in Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs.
Lastly, I want to point out that not all his films share those problems equally. The Darjeeling Limited has instead grown on me over time and to me is his strongest film (followed by Moonrise Kingdom) because there he focusses on the two aspects that I appreciate the most in his works. The connection of tragedy and humour is strong and genuine without falling too much on either side and becoming pathetic (as happens with Royal Tanenbaums, which is my third favourite).
Sorry for rambling, your short post inspired me to finally put my Anderson-dilemma into words.
No.880
>>830Hold up, Michelle Rodriguez is playing a woman not used to handling guns? I feel slightly compelled to watch that now.
I have seen the first three films, enjoyed only one and can't remember anything at all about 2 and 3 (except that there was a desert).
t. appreciater of the first two RE games (and their remakes) and non-appreciator of RE4 and it's legacy.
No.883
>>880She's playing a
clone of her character from the first movie, but it's really just a minor role
>I have seen the first three films, enjoyed only one and can't remember anything at all about 2 and 3 (except that there was a desert).Exactly how I felt before watching 4-6
>>875>I cannot tell how on earth I came across this so I thought I have to see this movie.Yeah, it's def not the most obvious pick.
No.886 KONTRA
>>876I love me a good, tasteful depiction of the “Happy peactimes” as we call them. Much better than being the butt of jokes like Austro-Hungary usually is.
Though it’s really the best when “we” do it. As in, the peoples that experienced it historically.
I always feel like Americans fundamentally misunderstand something about the milieu of the time, just like how I misunderstand the US most likely.
A homage is flattering, but ultimately it’s just them chasing something that they imagine as a depiction of reality.
The only thing I think we have a monopoly on, and I believe I’m not alone with this, at least in Hungary is making fun of the milieu and the characters and the whole thing.
Self-criticism is good, it’s healthy and helps ease the pain in this form.
But from the Americans and the other Entente powers it just feels like getting kicked in the ribs after they’ve already threw us on the ground. Yes, you fucking won, now piss off.
We are the only ones who get to make fun of our misery and the reasons that lead to it. You go take your dinky victory trophy and fuck off back to Piccadilly Square.
Of course when we do it, they are allowed to laugh “with” us. Not “at” us, “with” us.
No.887 KONTRA
>>886>it’s just them chasing something that they imagine as a depiction of reality. I imagine it to be the same with Hungarians tbh fam. History is too much about feely sense making once it leaves the dry halls of academia.
Imagine something like Babylon Berlin for Germans, it is basically just a version of Weimar "dance on the volcano"
and really it was more like Berlin, Berlin is very well researched culturally, Berlin is not Weimar as a historian said narrative along with the prominence of drugs, class and lgbtq because they produce(d) the show from not so current year anymore.
No.889
>>887>History is too much about feely sense making once it leaves the dry halls of academia.That's also very prevalent within the halls of academia.
>>886That sounds like losing the war is like a wound to Hungarys national pride. Am I getting this right?
Because that's not at all how it felt (to me and my surroundings) growing up in Germany. I've never heard anyone talk with bitterness about losing WW1 and WW2, neither from my generation nor any of my teachers or from the family. Quite the opposite, I've always associated losing the wars with a kind of enthusiasm, ie. "Thank dog we lost that war".
No.891 KONTRA
>>889>That's also very prevalent within the halls of academia.Not true. I have probably read between 500-1000 articles and books/chapters of academic history writing and they don't make a feely sensemaking of history like movies or TV shows.
No.894 KONTRA
>>891Sorry, you're right, I failed basic reading comprehension and overlooked the part about "feels". Academic historians don't try to convice readers via emotional pleas.
What I thought you had written was that emotional baggage plays into the research and interpretation of records. But I don't feel confident anymore making such a claim about historians tbh, my impressions are not from studying a large body of work but rather from cherry-picked pieces that may have reached by attention only because they were examples of "history done wrong". I recognize that I'm subject to the selection bias of an amateur/outsider.
No.895 KONTRA
>>894s/by attention/my attention/
No.1276
>>1272I recently watched Mandy, which might now be one of my favourite films with Nicolas Cage. Second only to "Pig", maybe.
Not a high bar, because I'm not much of a Cage fan, but if you're looking for Nicolas-madness those two are probably the icing on the Cage (get it? :-DDDD)
No.1278
>>1276Joke's on you, I watched Mandy years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
No.1331
For some time now, I have been half-watching The Big Bang Theory, not by my own volition.
While the first two or three seasons are easy watching with a few decent jokes, with the introduction of FemSheldon it took a nosedive and is still diving eight seasons later.
I don't even know how it could survive this long.
In the beginning it was awkward nerds doing cool things, now it's basically become a 90s family sitcom with like ten main characters, 90% of episodes being solely about relationship bullshit, everyone getting married, having children and discussing their relationships. There is at most one funny joke in an episode, despite the laughtrack trying to suggest otherwise. And then the joke is explained, so the braindead idiots watching this shit will also get it.
Oh, and FemSheldon can't even be called that anymore because after like one season she just became exactly like the other girls, except being exceptionally hideous. She's not even cute in a homely way, she's just ugly and revolting.
Also, everyone has an extremely annoying voice.
I also read or heard somewhere that when shows start running out of ideas, they get guest stars. Well, guess what? Quite literally every episode has at least one guest star who also usually appears as themself and then gets thoroughly fellated. Usually it's a fotm celeb like Elon Musk (ho boy did those episodes age badly).
Something I also noticed is that the nerds are prime consoomers, constantly discussing their favorite Marvel/DC $THING and seemingly not reading anything but comics. I mean there has been said enough on nerd blackface, but at times it seems more like advertisement than anything else (which it probably is).
There's even more that annoys me, but I could probably write a seven post essay on why TBBT is shit and would become increasingly irate, so I just tell everyone who genuinely enjoys this trite rubbish: Fuck you, fuck your family and fuck the ten generations of your ancestors, you FUCK!
If necessary, I would fugg the small squeaky one though, because she has big booba and no resting bitch face like the other one
No.1332 KONTRA
>>1331TBBT was basically THE thing that injected the masses with the consoom nerd shit culture. At least if we can believe imageboard hearsay.
Also, American tv-shows "devolving" into family sitcoms or mostly relationship centered series isn't all that unusual.
See how House has three really good seasons, a fourth okay and by the fifth it's only about relationship issues instead of trying to figure out why some dipshit retard is pissing out his kidneys through his ass.
Americans basically don't know when to end a show and drag it on forever until the ratings inevitably kill it, or someone's conscience takes the better of them (like Seinfeld killing Seinfeld.)
No.1335
>>1331>so I just tell everyone who genuinely enjoys this trite rubbish: Fuck you, fuck your family and fuck the ten generations of your ancestors, you FUCKGet rid of the reason you are watching it, or be honest about it. Let me guess,
GF?
No.1336
>>1331Never was good. I tried to watch one of the first episodes and it was painfully cringe.
>>1332House too was meh in my impression.
For me what you say applies to "South Park". (end they're conscious about it, see Ep704 -- even though it came out long before SP stopped being cool). What do Ernsts think about SP?
> Americans basically don't know when to end a show and drag it on forever until the ratings inevitably kill itNo one knows... Or rather no one tries. From your perspective it's better to end a show when it stops being good. For directors it's better to milk it for a few more seasons while it's still profitable. Because people will still watch it for a while by inertia instead of risking trying something new, viewers are lazy creatures.
No.1338
>>1336>What do Ernsts think about SP?Haven't watched it for years, if not decades. Side note, I once watched a documtary/behind the scenes showing how tight and close to broadcasting their writing schedule is. Since they do "ripped from the headlines" topics, they have to do it so people still care when the episode is out.
>viewers are lazy creatures.More like, they don't want to invest time into something that could turn out a disappointment/get cancelled soon.
No.1339 KONTRA
>>1336I don't think I ever watched SP for the right reasons. To me it was always only entertaining because of how good the Hungarian dub was and the swearing.
Some episodes unironically taught me new slurs.
Otherwise, I don't think I ever gave a shit about the "quality" of the show or the "social critique" they do.
No.1340
>>1336>What do Ernsts think about SP?Used to watch when my schedule left me in front of the TV at midnight and reruns were played back to back on some channel. Enjoyed it for what is was- a cartoon- but never bought into the deep commentary meme. Haven't seen a new episode in years.
No.1783
Ratings for recent films
1)Dust in the Wind - 4/5
This film was really quite nice – it was light on plot, but more heavy on feels. There is that difficult feeling to articulate, of life passing you by. This film seems to try its best to capture it. The basic plot is centred around the main character Wan. He grows up, he drops out of school, he gets a job, and he end up doing his 3 years in the army (as a conscript). Life occurs around him. It had a very melancholy overtone. I have avoided a lot so as not to spoil, but would recommend.
2)Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence - 5/5
This film was great – while not perfect, I really enjoyed it much more than I expected to. The general premise is based around a British soldier who has been taken prisoner in the pacific theatre – he’s a bit of an odd one, and the prison commander takes a strange liking to him. The themes are around the inevitability of fate. I really loved this one. One of my favourites. Not perfect (the flashback scenes were a little hamfisted, and I think more to keep the light on Bowie, rather than Conti's character, who I felt was a little more interesting), but I still loved it. I plan to re-watch this film in future.
The theme is one of my stand-out memories from it. The composer plays the camp commander also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8JdWs3jtcs.
3)Francis Ha - 2/5
I kind of felt a little bored through this. I heard positive things, but it was just a girl meddling through her lower-middle-class life in NY. It wasn’t terrible, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend it. It didn’t seem particularly deep or thought provoking. It also didn’t seem to elicit emotion or feelings. The plot wasn’t particularly interesting either. Solid 2/5. Not actively bad, but never again.
4)The Crossing - 3.5/5
This film was good – it had an absolutely beautiful art-style (think, Loving Vincent, or any film by Alexandr Petrov). The premise is around a family caught up in a war (fictionalised countries), and then being displaced as refugees. It primarily follows the daughter of the family through this. The plot was fine, but nothing exceptional I think – but the art style really kept it all together. It was beautiful to watch. If a fan of either Loving Vincent, or Petrov, one would likely enjoy this.
Trailer for sample
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfZkdeoK6OE No.1798 KONTRA
>>1796Wim Wenders is pseud shit, so don't watch Paris, Texas.
No.1799 KONTRA
>>1798I liked it. Calling a movie pseud is a meaningless statement in the end. It boils down to didn't like it because it gave me nothing, didn't like ti because I don't understand it
which is close to the first, if you don't understand or can relate, it gives you nothing but that is normal, since people don't relate to everything in the same way or didn't like it because it was art housy and I don't like art housy movies because they a re pseud.
Some movies try to hard without being original but Paris, Texas was ok at least I'd say. I would watch it for the US 1980s vibes alone.
No.1814
>>1799Pseud is just a nice buzzword that transports a certain connotation without me having to explain everything in detail, but he has something about him I don't like, and his films are pretentious as fuck. Yes, Lola rennt, too.
Palermo Shooting retroactively ruined all his works for me, what an utter piece of shit garbage flick.
No.1819
'''Freeway (1996)'''
Little Red Riding Hood except it's set in white trash America. Nice mix of pure exploitation and social commentary on the criminal justice system. Reese Witherspoon is amazing in it, I had to laugh out loud at some of the lines she delivers with that thick Texas accent. Experimental soundtrack rocks as well.
'''My Darling Clementine (1946)'''
> When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit.Quintessential western from the master himself. A lot to gush about, but Victor Mature's Doc Holliday is perhaps one of the finest antiheroes.
'''Innocence (2004)'''
Veeeery slow arthouse film about girls growing up in a sort of purely metaphorical space, it kind of reminded me of like a magical girl anime where fighting the monsters is like a metaphor for growing up. There's a low-key element of horror, you expect something terrible to happen any minute but then the ending is rather beautiful. Sick sound design too.
'''Alien: Covenant (2017)'''
Michael Fassbender's very impressive in it playing the two androids but other than that it's just a fine popcorn flick, don't even care how it connects to the franchise.
>>1796Don't know about The Ants & the Grasshopper but can't go too wrong with any of the other ones. If you haven't seen anything but Ozu yet I'd go with Tokyo Story.
>>1783>Dust in the WindNoice, I've been meaning to watch sth by Hou Hisao-hsien again, tho I think I'll go with Millenium Mambo first
>Merry Christmas Mr LawrenceYep, great movie, love the soundtrack as well.
>>1798Not a huge Wenders fan, but really liked Paris, Texas. The main character reminded me a lot of my best friend from high school.
No.1827
>>1819Gotta love those old timey german titles.
>FAUSTRECHT DER PRÄRIEDespite them often being corny and sensational and sometimes completely unrelated to the film itself, or even misleading, I certainly like them, or even a german sub-title better than using a different english title, like with Taken/48 Hours or Cradle 2 The Grave/Born 2 Die.
No.1835
>>1827>using a different english titleFunny, I mentioned that a while back on the other Ernstchan. My guess is the"reason" behind that seems to be "oh no, the real title has complicated words the average cinema goer is too stupid for, let's change it - but English is so kool"
No.1840
>>1835>My guess is the"reason" behind that seems to be[...]Interesting theory, but "FORTY-EIGHT HOURS" is definitely more complicated than "TAKEN".
Especially this case is even more puzzling to me because the 48 hours films already exist and they are even called "48 Stunden". My guess is that ad people are behind this. They can't speak proper english, but have also completely un-learned (or never spoken) proper german. Maybe the EcKinsey Ernst can put out some treatise on this.
No.1842
What a fucking mess of a movie. 90% of it is just a man taking his wife and kids around the Disney World while lusting after two teenage girls, and the rest is a mix of "horror" stuff without any rhyme or reason. Random hallucinations with scary faces? Sure. Urban legends? Throw 'em in. Spooky conspiracies? Of course. Homicidal children? Oldie but goodie. A mysterious sickness going around? Can't have enough of it. Sexual symbolism? It will make our movie seem deeper. Oh, and make it all monochrome, cause we're, like, indie 'n' shiet. And I don't even hate incoherent horror movies as long as they have at least something interesting about them — visuals, setting, atmosphere — but this one has absolutely nothing, and it also ends up being completely boring. I usually hate it when horror films rely heavily on jumpscares, but this time I was actually hoping for one after sitting through half of this trash, because at least I would get some kick out of it, but it never happened, unless you count the aforementioned random scary faces (and you shouldn't, because they are more cringey than actually scary, and, like the rest of the movie, make no sense whatsoever). Avoid this movie like a cat flu.
No.1847
>>1841Yeah I would have probably gone for something more analogous and less forceps-german like "Entführt" or even "Taken - Entführt" or something.
Both of which are certainly better than "FOHRTIE-ÄITT-AUERS".
No.1974
GF is watching Friends.
It's certainly funnier than contemporary american "comedy", but I forgot just how quickly thing escalate to relationship bullshit. It's not even the first half of the second season and the Ross-Rachel shit is already in full swing.
Rachel and Ross are definitely the worst people of the group. Rachel is a dumb, utterly entitled bitch who never gets her comeuppance whatsoever and Ross is a horribly jealous maniac who forgot how to talk and only communicates by actual whining and it will only get worse with the two of them.
I generally can enjoy the show, especially Joey/Monica shenanigans, but I feel it become a bit more exhausting on every rewatch.
No.1994
>>1974>I forgot just how quickly thing escalate to relationship bullshitExactly like your posts. "My gf this, my gf that"
No.2079 KONTRA
>>1974I would reject the shit out of anyone who forces me to watch this bullcrap. You got to be dumb like shit or a cunt to like that. It's new kids turbo tier but for women.
No.2091
>>2086They needed the audience that identifies with the trash, without reflection. And the audience that feels a little better than the trash and needs someone, anyone, to feel superior to.
No.2375
Clint Eastwood plays a truck driver Philo Beddoe who lives with his brother Orville, his old mother and his pet orangutan Clyde. Philo just carries on with his lazy life, drinking in bars and making some side cash on bare knuckle fighting, until one day he meets a beautiful singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor and falls for her. After a couple of nights together with Philo, Lynn just suddenly leaves the town, and Philo, Orville and Clyde set out to go all the way to Denver to find her and, while they're there, face the local bare-knuckle champion, Tank Murdock.
Okayish comedy/action/road movie. Reminds me of Smokey and the Bandit a bit, with a little splash of Rocky. It's a bit silly and eccentric, but not ultra-retarded like contemporary Murrican comedies. Most of the laughs are provided by the side characters: a biker gang who made a fatal mistake of bullying Philo, a couple of hapless cops who just happened to be in the way when Philo wasn't feeling so bright, and Philo and Orville's mom. The soundtrack is entirely country-and-western which might not be to everyone's liking (I personally am not a fan of the style at all), but it fits the mood of small Murrican towns that the heroes visit on their way to Denver very well. Sure, there are better and funnier comedy road movies, like the aforementioned Smokey and the Bandit or The Blues Brothers, but this one has its moments too, and, if anything, makes for a nice relaxing watch with some beers.
No.2842
Watched Jojo Rabbit yesterday. Not necessarily by my own free will, because I expected something else, namely a horribly jewish film like The Dictator.
But frankly, I was positively surprised.
What starts out as some kind of silly wacky nazi comedy quickly develops into a melodramatic almost-coming-of-age story (not really because the boy just ages a year from 10 to 11) with some very touching and sad moments that, depending on one's mood, can hit really hard.
Granted, it has the odd flash of absurdist humor, even in those serious sequences (like Hauptmann K's uniform), but overall I was impressed by how this material was treated and how even innocent children are dragged into this inhumane system, getting turned into monsters by monstrous adults like Fräulein Whatshername and ultimately leading to total destruction for no gains at all.
It was a bit weird how everyone basically talked like a 21st century person, but I think that was a conscious choice, as with e.g. the music. I also had to giggle sometimes a bit because apparently since What we do in the Shadows, the guy who dubbed Waititi there is his standard voice, and him trying to give a Hitler impression didn't do anything because I could always only hear Viago.
What I found a bit peculiar was how Waititi apparently was trying to imitate Wes Anderson, because the visual style - camera, sets, costumes and such - could have easily been from one of his films. It also didn't help that Johannes' single friend looked like a fat version of the boy from Moonrise Kingdom and how the HJ camp sequence in the beginning was basically set up like some boy scouts sequence from american films.
They also couldn't help injecting some "hurr le jewish indomitable spirit, god's chosen people and constant survivors" shit, but it was just a few moments, so it wasn't that bad. In fact, I wouldn't even mention it, if the jewish girl had been any kind of spiritual or something, or actually found her faith through hardship or something, but for that character, being jewish was just the premise for getting into danger, apart from that she was, as expected, just a normal girl who wanted to live a normal life. Maybe that was also a conscious decision to display some kind of coping mechanism. No idea, shall the scholars deal with that.
Performances are all pretty good; Scarlett Johansson as Jojo's mother is gorgeous and strong, the girl is cute, Sam Rockwell plays Sam Rockwell playing a Wehrmacht officer, Rebel Wilson plays some repulsive woman (as always) and Waititi as Hitler does a good job veering from just silly to actually mean in a way that kids know it's not playtime anymore.
So all in all, I can really recommend it. The gags hit 90% of the time and the serious parts are indeed serious and have no less impact than, say, Schindler's List, but without Fiennes' silly accent.
No.2855
Went to the arthouse cinema and watched The Plains (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag2rtRgPDFsThe movie is just one camera perspective, from the back seat of the car, always rushhour time and throughout the seasons. And it's 3h. But it is rarely boring. It is sort of soothing, it has humor and it feels very real, but is is staged with amateurs that play themselves. So this movie is a sort of doc fiction, playing with the border of fact and fiction, with documentaries also being constructed in the end.
It might be very long but it also seems to be that long to emphasize the commuter experience and the also the experience of age sort of.
So what is it about? It is about a guy in his late 50s or even early 60s that commutes back home, sometimes accompanied by a young coworker (aged 31
the director plays this role) and they just talk. There is a narrative in it, the intimacy of the car makes this special, as the narrative is not so special, in fact, people will identify with certain parts because it is not uncommon what is talked about (including the dementing mother as hinted in the trailer). But the daily dread of rushhour and this simple
plain keke, but the plains is something else yet delicate, almost too real, narrative makes you feel like sitting in the back of the car, listening to people you don't know too well but yet it's very familiar. Also of course the car has this womb atmosphere as was discussed here lately :DDD
In between actual amateur drone footage from the real commuter is woven into the car scenes and it makes a nice contrast, also tricks you as viewer into the reality fiction, staged/non-staged confusion
No.3426
Some random facts about actors in popular shows that hated each other in RL:
- Ed O'Neill and Amanda Bearse in Married With Children. Seems like things started to get tense when after a few yeas into the show the lesbian Bearse changed her apperance to be more masculine, which led to O'Neill and others either making fun of that, or Bearse being preemptively defensive, because she feared they would make fun of her.
- Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Lynn Ryan in Star Trek: Voyager. Apparently Kate Mulgrew hated that the series introduced a younger, more sexy female role, and let it out on Ryan. Later, Mulgrew seems to have acknowledged that it was her fault and she treated Ryan badly.
- George Peppard and Mr. T. in A-Team. Peppard was butthurt since he thought he was the star of the show, but the audience gave Mr. T. more love. It must have been so bad that the two wouldn't talk with each other on the set, and Faceman and Murdock had to play diplomats. Peppard apparently was well known for being difficult to deal with. He also hated Melinda Culea, who played Amy, because she wanted to have more character development, and he instead told her that she's irrelevant for the show. Eventually, Culea was fired from the show.
No.3427
>>3426The Peppard one gets me most. Did he actually star in anything of note besides Breakfast at Tiffany's?
No.3431
Started watching The Sopranos.
The way Tone's mamma talks to him hits way too close to home and I am not sure if she's just an extremely realistically written lady or it's mine who is literally as crazy as some mafia show character.
No.3447
>>3426>Ed O'Neill and Amanda BearseI watched an Interview with Ed O'Neill where he said that, when she married a woman, everyone was invited except for him and the guy who played the son.
This is from the interview and it really, really made me like Ed O'Neill
https://youtu.be/ZkjNyoPRBsc?t=104>>3431You should keep watching. No spoilers but if you like the mom it's going to be good.
How far are you in already?
No.3502
>>3447I didn't say I like the mom.
Also, how long will I have to watch until I know if I like it? Frankly, I am not really feeling it. I am not even sure what this show is actually supposed to be about.
Five episodes in, Tone just killed some rat while on college applicatin tour with the daughter.
No.3547
>>3502I looked at the episode listing and it's going to take a while for the really good episodes to come. 11, 12 and 13 are good. But I guess if you don't like it now, you won't like it anytime soon.
No.3621
An old hobo comes into a new town in hope to collect enough money for a lawnmower and start a lawn mowing business. Little did he know that the town is a den of crime and violence ruled by the mob boss Drake and his sons Slick and Ivan who also have the police in their pocket and keep all citizens subdued through fear. One day, after witnessing to many horrible things happening around him, the hobo buys a shotgun instead of a lawnmower and proceeds to clean the streets up.
A very straightforward grindhouse vigilante movie, without complicated plot or excessive drama, just a man who has had enough fighting against a bunch of grade A scum. It invokes gory B movies, sometimes getting pretty ridiculous with its violent scenes, but it works fine in this case, since you expect a movie named "Hobo with a Shotgun" to be ridiculous anyway. Performances are also fittingly over-the-top, except for the hobo played by Rutger Hauer who not only absolutely nails the role of a pissed-off avenger from the lower depths of the society, but also could probably carry the entire movie by himself if it happened to be completely awful (which it isn't, thankfully). In conclusion, it's an entertaining flick, with lots of gore, some dark humor and a satisfying if pretty sad ending.
No.3672
>>3621Oh I really enjoyed Hobo with a Shotgun but I completely forgot it was Rutger Hauer. Or rather, I didn't even notice it was him when I watched it, maybe?
Either way, this movie was fun for precisely the reasons you described.
I think I watched it back to back with Rubber, which was surprisingly fitting.
No.3678
>>3672>I completely forgot it was Rutger HauerI guess he's just not the sort of a guy one expects to play a hobo, but if he actually does, it feels so organic that your forget about the actor himself.
>RubberDidn't enjoy this one, to be honest. It was kinda stupid, but not stupid enough to cross the certain threshold that would make it entertaining. Could be worse, of course.
No.3679
The only question I have concerning the Hobo: squibs or cgi?
No.3697
>>3679You mean what did they use in the movie? I think most special effects were practical.
No.3699
>>3697Excellent, it's on my watchlist now.
No.3797
Watched a few films lately:
>The Blob (1958)
Steve McQueen, almost 30 at that time, plays a teenager who, with his girlfriend, gets dragged into the event around a mysterious alien lifeform that simply absorbs people. It's red and only all the americans working together, with no actual antagonist but the monster, manage to contain (not actually defeat) it.
I am a sucker for those old monster films and this one certainly had its charm, and the effects were pretty good, considering this wasn't exactly a big budget production.
Also, I was amazed just how long fire extinguishers seem to have lasted in the 50s.
>The Blob (1988)
- Do you know what they call "The Blob" in Paris?
- They don't call it "The Blob"?
- No, they got the french language there, they wouldn't even know what a "The" is
- And what do they call it?
- They call it "Le Blob"
- "LE BLOB" *Samuel L Jackson laughing*
French is such a funny language, but nothing beats "Massacre à la tronçonneuse". Anyway, I digress.
So, this is the remake of the film mentioned above. The general plotline and key elements follow the original, but there are some differences, as to the origin of the monster, for example, or how it's the misfit who becomes the hero (despite obviously shooting for a career in the Sisters of Mercy), and the obligatory 80s horror film "happy end, actually not SIKE" that has become such a tired cliche.
Also, this one was made on a much higher budget (adjusted for inflation is cost about 25 times as much as the original) and it shows in all the action setpieces like the obligatory 80s motorcycle chase and lots of guns and truck stunts.
The special effects are really good, though the rear projection is pretty obvious to the trained eye, but holy shit do the gnarly kills and the general design of the Blob make up for that.
Special mention of a very young Erika Eleniak (known from Under Siege and Bordello of Blood, for example) who gets sucked out from the inside, eh, to the inside, uh... what?
Like a lot of those non-totally-mainstream 80s horror flicks it has the very same problem, which is many unnecessary lengths. It works where there is tension to be built, but it doesn't work in such a film, but that's something one has to live with, I guess.
>The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Peter Weller before he made Robocop starred in this (master(piece) of shit), along many other, today well-known actors.
Basically it's about a neurosurgeon/physicist/rockstar who discovered access to the 8th dimension having to prevent aliens from destroying the earth.
I actually have a hard time reviewing this film, because the single elements were all very promising, the funny parts were funny, the dramatic parts were dramatic and the action was serviceable, but it was just such a mix of many different elements that the confused editing made it a bit exhausting in parts. Maybe I also saw some german version with the expectably senseless cuts.
I will not recommend this to anyone who needs a film to be "smart" and cerebral.
It's fun, mostly, you will probably enjoy it with a few beers and a few friends, and this could have been an eternal classic if the story weren't constantly flip-flopping around and switching genres every three seconds.
Also, Ellen Barkin was smoking hot at that time, she was even hotter here than in Down by Law.
No.4255
I saw a scene from it on Youtube and I felt like it'd be good to engage with Soviet stuff again.
It's a very good movie. Though I wouldn't call it a documentary. The style is very British, but it adds to the humour I guess, even if ultimately it makes the USSR's top brass more sophisticated than it ever was.
Though I don't feel like I had any "laugh out loud" moments where I couldn't keep myself from laughing, I constantly had a smirk on my face during the latter half as the puzzle pieces fell into place.
They build up the intrigue nicely and the first half of the movie makes Beria look like such a fucking dickhead that when the finale rolls around it feels like a total release on the viewer's part to watch the coup unfold.
As I said, the acting works, even if it's a bit too British at times. It feels cohesive throughout.
It doesn't weight down the viewer with too much historical context. Everything is carefully explained, though there are sometimes acts of fanservice, so to speak when they namedrop someone or if you know the character it adds to the story something more. Like you can watch it without knowing who Maria Yudina is, but if you read Shostakovich's Testimony then the film neatly ties into this Soviet Mythos of sorts.
And the soundtrack. Fuck the soundtrack is fucking amazing. It's orchestral and I initially thought it was using some more obscure Shostakovich pieces, but no, apparently the composer for the film went out of his way to imitate Shostakovich's signature style and I was completely fooled at times.
It has those changing ABABAB notes Shostakovich loves, the sometimes bit falsch sounds, that borderline avantgarde chaos, and a lot of quotations from Soviet/Russian revolutionary music.
No.4267
>>4255>THE DEDTH OF STDLINI remember watching it and then looking up what happened to find out all that outrageous shit really happened and that Beria was probably a lot worse than portrayed in the film.
Also, fucking Zhukov, I like how his portrayal in the film was exactly as the OP picture of the war thread.
No.4534
>Asteroid City
Newest second best Anderson flick, if you don't like his style, keep moving, because he just keeps doing it, this time with, in my perception, a bit of a Coen-y feel - might be the setting and music.
Overall I liked it, despite not really "getting" it.
What I mean is that this one is extremely meta. It's not an "actual" story like the other ones (sans French Dispatch maybe), but it's a movie about a play, and the whole plot is the plot of the play written in the film, so all the characters acting and the (fantastic) events happening are not real, even in the reality of the film.
I've since read a few reviews and most people who don't like this film criticize the "weird and confusing" plot. Safe to say, that's a brainlet opinion, because the plot itself isn't hard to follow, and the meta levels are easy to follow, too, unlike something like, say, Synecdoche New York.
However, what is not so clear is the meaning of it all, provided there is a "message" at all. If you don't like thinking about that kind of stuff, you can enjoy the film as another quirky series of events with quirky characters and a lot of star power down to the smallest supporting roles.
If you do, you will probably have to rewatch, because I am still not quite sure if the "play" part was supposed to be serious or actually just the words of the author in the "real" part, because the dialogue was overall pretty melancholic; I would say it was the most serious dialogue since Darjeeling Limited, and the most pretentious on top of that, and even in the "play" universe there was an actress currently rehearsing for some play or film. I am wondering in general why I am seeing Scarlett Johansson in so much stuff, and she seems to have found a certain type of character she's playing - the sad, thoughtful woman, which she also plays here.
I am not a fan of film about "the business", but this one is gladly not quite hitting that spot, although it is, kind of. Maybe that is what throws me off - is it a story about a story or is it the director himself talking about himself?
Maybe I missed something, who knows?
Images attached are representative of the whole film.
No.4764
This show is absolutely great. Not only it is one of the most nerve-racking and terrifying depictions of a nuclear disaster in fiction, standing right beside such movies as Threads and When the Wind Blows, but it's also probably the best fiction show/movie about the Chernobyl catastrophe that we will ever get. It doesn't downplay the sheer horror of the situation and it doesn't turn the liquidators simply into losers sent to their deaths by their higher-ups, but instead gives them credit where credit's due and shows them as they really were: heroes. Likewise, it doesn't take an anti-nuclear stance (often bordering on being anti-scientific) which is quite popular among Western eco-freaks, but instead attacks ignorance and misinformation and the potential dangers that they may bring about. Officials who want to sweep the whole incident under the rug and cover their asses (Bryukhanov, Fomin, Dyatlov) and party members who will go to any lengths in order to prevent the USSR looking bad (KGB chief Charkov, the director of the institute who brushed off Khomyuk and whoever that old man in the first episode was supposed to be) are opposed by people who understand the gravity of the situation and do everything possible to contain it and save as much people as they can (Legasov, Shcherbina, Khomyuk, general Pikalov, general Tarakanov), making it a conflict between authoritarian bureaucracy and scientific community.
I was also very impressed by the depiction of the Soviet setting and Soviet people, and Eastern Slavic people in particular. The buildings are accurate, the equipment and vehicles are accurate (and also a bit nostalgic for me: I haven't seen LAZ buses and RAF-2203 based ambulances for at least two decades), fashions are accurate, the written Russian is correct, and the people, instead of being some idiotic caricatures speaking with heavy fake accents and using horribly mangled Russian words randomly are actually shown very respectfully. Hell, the creators didn't even miss tiny details like Lyudmila Ignatenko wearing her wedding ring on the right hand, just as she is supposed to. Sure, there are some fuck-ups, both minor (like some weird names: Ulana Khomyuk (why not call her Ulyana, which is a perfectly fine Slavic name, even if rare) and judge Milan Kadnikov (Milan is a Yugoslavian name, not East Slavic)) and major (Perestroika-time KGB acting as if it's Stalin's Cheka or NKVD — yeah, nah, wouldn't happen in real life; likewise, Shcherbina threatening to throw out Legasov from the helicopter and shoot the pilot for disobedience is pure bullshit), but compared to how Slavs and Soviets usually are in Western fiction, it's a huge step forward, and might actually be the best Western depiction of Slavic/Soviet people that I've ever seen.
In conclusion, it's a must-watch. It's definitely not an easy show to watch, and I personally felt emotionally drained afterwards, but it's just so good that you should watch it no matter what.
No.5325
>Good Omens Series 2
tl;dr: Less humor, more relationship (drama).
WARNING FULL SPOILERS AHEAD!
This is basically just a post to vent because this one was actually making me a bit mad.
Especially watching the first and second series back to back it's just amazing how much better the first one is.
I suspect it's because it's based on an actual book that was written way before Amazon existed.
Now in the second series, the archangel Gabriel, a slick asshole who was portrayed as an extremely unsympathetic character, appears in the angel's bookstore, in the nude and without memory, and it's up to the dynamic duo to solve this mystery.
Sounds like a proper premise, but the devil is, as often, in the execution.
And with this one I feel like they were going for the nu-Who audience. I can see the board meeting going
>Yeah wasn't this guy a Doctor Who?
>And wasn't that one extremely popular with women?
>Absolutely! Now let's make for exactly that audience!
>But wouldn't that be boring shite with all the love stuff and relationship drama?
>Who cares, I can already see the dollar signs in my eyes!
So, what do we get? Mostly unattractive women so the audience won't feel threatened. A black lesbian (but not disabled) and a fat lesbian, actually disabled people playing angels (which is funny, because the heavenly forces are portrayed as douches), Jon Hamm playing a much bigger role because he is so handsome, but interestingly they made Beelzebub more attractive, probably because they introduced a love story between the archangel Gabriel and the lord of hell Beelzebub. Meanwhile the angeldemon are trying to bring the lesbian couple together to fool the heavenly inspectors because a small miracle they produced was bigger than they thought.
So we already have two love stories. Granted, the Gabriel/Beelzebub thing that was only revealed in the last episode was a twist I actually didn't expect, although there already was a love story, and in principle it's very silly because why would angels or demons fall in love in the first place?
However, a third season already got set up, and you know how? Because they had hinted the whole time that angeldemon were more than just "friends", so, because it's 2023, demon has to kiss angel before storming off because angel takes up a new job in heaven. Please note that what I find irritating about this is that it happens at all, not that it's a gay kiss, but it just feels all too pandering, because you just KNOW that all the Who fangirls will completely leak out from that scene. And I actually said already in the first episode that they will probably kiss or something. And this is something they just invented, because nowhere in the book or in the first season has it ever been hinted that they were, even just secretly, gay for each other. In fact I find it pretty problematic that it's not possible anymore to show a genuine friendship between two males (or at least male form) without any gay stuff, just like the people claiming that Frodo and Sam were gay for each other.
Then of course you have the usual current year politics shit ("toxic" is mentioned once, too, by the demon) and rather on-the-nose social commentary, what with how god can make a bet with satan and allow such cruelty to such a pious man blablabla, and some rich/poor situations in the 18th century (which is, to be fair, solved in a rather differentiated way), but from what I read from Pratchett (which is admittedly indeed just Good Omens and some Tiffany Aching books), his social commentary has never been that subtle, so this is probably indeed in his spirit.
Also, no Frances McDormand voiceover anymore.
But even subtracting all the aforementioned bullshit, this season was just... lacking.
Next season will see the second coming of Christ, so maybe that one will be more entertaining again.
No.5338
Have you watched Oppenheimer or Barbie? Or not falling for the hype?
No.5340 KONTRA
>>5338I watched Oppenheimer. Breddy gud movie, 5/5.
No.5348 KONTRA
>>5338Nah, I stopped watching Nolan shit after the slap in the face that was Interstellar.
Not interested in Barbieshit, especially when even art house cinemas show it.
No.5351
>>5338Oppie was alright, but I have my usual gripes with Nolan in that I both enjoy the bombast and fast pacing but also think it's kinda tedious, it's not as smart as he thinks it is and the nonlinear narrative is convoluted for no good reason. But yeah, looks and sounds pretty great (got to watch it on 70mm), a couple standout scenes (the speech after the successful test e.g.), so worth watching imo
Gonna go watch Barbie soon as well, mostly heard good things about it. Expecting to like it since I'm a big fan of the Goose and Margot Robbie's been great in Babylon. Gerwig's Lady Bird was pretty funny too, though ultimately not really a movie I could relate to much
No.5353
>>5338The hype actually made me less interested (in Oppenheimer, that is, I don't care about Barbie at all). Maybe I'll watch it in several years or so.
No.5442
Brandon, a young monk, lives in the abbey of Kells with his uncle, abbot Cellach. The abbot is only obsessed with building a wall around the abbey to protect it from Viking raiders, and while Brandon understands the importance of this endeavor, he is still curious both about the books the scribe monks work on and about the outside world. One day brother Aidan, who fled the isle of Iona that was pillaged by Vikings, comes into the abbey and, much to abbot Cellach's chagrin, introduces to Brandon the art of illumination (that is, illustrating manuscripts). This serves as a catalyst for Brandon's imagination and curiosity, and inadvertently, when he was searching the woods for materials to make ink, even gets him into contact with the supernatural...
This is one of the most beautiful cartoons I have ever seen. Its story, visuals and score are inspired by Celtic culture, but even if you are not interested in Irish mythology and art, it's still worth checking out because of how gorgeous it is. The plot is simple yet touching, the humor and drama are balanced, and the actors, including child ones, did well. It is also almost entirely hand-drawn, which makes it a breath of fresh air in the animation industry which is now dominated by 3DCG cartoons. It's pretty much a perfect family cartoon, that is, the sort of cartoon which would be interesting both for children and adults.
No.5462
>>5442I loved this film so much!
There are two more from the same team that I have to recommend because they are equally great.
1) Song of the Sea: Set in the modern world, the two children of a lighthouse keeper are forced to move to the city after having lived with their dad at the light house for their entire (young) lives. But then the sister vanishes, similar to how their mother did shortly after their birth. And so the boy goes on a journey to find his sister. Song of the Sea dives much deeper into celtic folklore than The Secret of Kells did.
2) Wolfwalkers: Ireland again, the year is 1650 and just like the other two films the theme touches the struggle between humans and the mystical, natural world. For this one I feel it's best not to know much about the plot going in. It's much closer to The Secret of Kells, but the animation quality is turned up to 11.
No.5464
>>5462Yep, I know about them, and as soon as I finished watching The Secret of Kells, they got into my plan-to-watch list. To be honest, I'm usually pretty biased against contemporary Western animation because of the art style I hate (CalArts was a mistake), issues I can't relate to (middle class Murrican liberal arts graduates and their problems can go fuck themselves) and humor that makes me cringe (neither the "quirky" millenial lolsorandomness nor the omnipresent stuck-up sarcasm are capable of squeezing a smile outta me), but once in a while I encounter if not a masterpiece, but at the very least a genuinely good cartoon, and I'm glad that my bias has been proven wrong. Case in point: Over the Garden Wall, which I have seen recently. I went into that show expecting to hate it, but ended up binge-watching all ten episodes and loving it. It was just so nice and cozy.
No.5469
>>5464>Case in point: Over the Garden Wall, which I have seen recently. I went into that show expecting to hate it, but ended up binge-watching all ten episodes and loving it. It was just so nice and cozy.My man! Over the Garden Wall was pretty amazing, might be time for a re-watch.
Based on what you wrote there you might also enjoy Ernest & Celestine. It's cozy and wholesome, never dumbed down and the themes are very far away from millenial and zoomer culture; and for the art and animation, well, see for yourself:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=PyU-mSUOnSs No.6341
Went and saw the meme movie, Oppenheimer with family. Well with my mother and sister anyway. I don’t think any of us actually wanted to do it but my mother threw it out as a plan and we took it. Anything but to be subjected to Barbie. So by the first hour my sister was checked out and using her phone and my mother said at one point she almost fell asleep during the movie.
I personally think it was okay. It was a movie with some nice narrative tricks and a good soundtrack, but it just simply didn’t make me piss my and shit and coom in my pants by how good it was.
Though in the first 20 minutes it did made me think that the best type of sex really might be with loony leftist Chicks who make you read out poetry in a dead language. But I digress.
It was complex, but not nearly unfollowable, so I’m surprised journaloids had to write “Oppenheimer explained” articles. Am I too smart or is the esteemed public just retarded?
I liked the trick Nolan pulled by making it so that the bomb is initially silent, with time nearly stopping, before Oppenheimer drops the Gita-quote and the cinema literally explodes from the sound.
It was really neatly shot, though you cold also say that maybe it had a bit too many shots of the main character’s thousand-yard-stare.
I insisted on watching it with subs so we did that, because I am not going to subject myself to Hungarian dubbing which is usually so attrocious on movies like these that you can practically reconstruct the original script in English if you try hard enough.
Funny thing I noticed is how despite it not being a “universe movie” or something in a Franchise, Nolan keeps dropping stuff that feel like sequelbait in a sense, or rather, the autdience at this point has been primed to think it’s teasing another film, like them namedropping Kennedy near the end.
I don’t think I could ever love movies, Ernst. It’s like most people can watch them habitually, but I just simply cannot, even when I’m taken back in I never feel like “yeah, I need to see another movie ASAP”.
Am I broken or something?
No.6343
>>6341>Am I too smart or is the esteemed public just retarded?It's a Nolan film, and "Nolan films are smart" has, at this point, become a meme in and by itself. Hint: They're not (except maybe Memento).
>Am I broken or something?Maybe change your approach? For example watching Lynch's Lost Highway expecting rational explanations is doing it wrong. Watching something like Conan the Barbarian expecting a The Big Sleep plot is doing it wrong. Watching modern Disneyshit and expecting good craftsmanship of any kind is doing it wrong. Watching Sucker Punch and expecting anything beyond attractive girls in short skirts doing anime shit is doing it wrong.
In practice this means you shouldn't watch a film expecting a certain thing, and instead be open minded about what it is doing, and it helps to try and ignore who made it. Too many cases where a film got blasted because the current persona non grata made it or because someone played in it who "doesn't fit". For example Bruce Willis in Die Hard, who was a light (rom)com actor; people were worried he couldn't pull off the action hero.
Granted, for a biopic of any kind the scope is a bit narrower than somewhere else, plus it's a Nolan film so you know exactly what to expect: Bombast that *makes you feel* smart that will be old on the first rewatch at most because that's when you realize that it is indeed merely bombast employed to mask the lack of actual characters or brains.
No.6344
>>6343I guess my problem is that I was expecting to be sent into a mania because of it. Like I had this faintest hope that it'd trigger something in me and it'd make me want to engage with physics of scientific history or something afterwards, but I wasn't really feeling anything when I left the theatre. It happened, and it was well composed but that's it.
At least when I saw inception (when I was like what, 14) and Interstellar it gave me some food for thought before I realised "Wait this is fucking stupid". Here it's just a good biopic and mythmaking but I didn't feel like I was ignited or something.
Probably a personal issue.
No.6346
>>6344>but I didn't feel like I was ignited or something. Sounds like you didn't reach critical mass :^)
No.6364
>>6341>Oppenheimercurrently watching in my local cinema with mum and sis as well.
with russian gambling site ads burned on the screenso far seems decent.
girl:
>so u no commie-cat?Oppenheimer:
>well, i read a little...>there is some thinking: ~ownership is theft.g:
>property.o:
>property?g:
>property not ownership.o:
>sry, i read it in the original, german.had to giggle.
because it reminded me of Heisenbergsche Unschärferelation/uncertainty principle.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbergsche_Unsch%C3%A4rferelationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principleErnst rly thinks the english translation/name is bad. the german name points towards the problem, the english translation points at the consequences. And Ernst feels his suspicion confirmed by the difference in wiki-article-length. the english article is a lot longer and uses a lot more visual aids to get the idea across. just give it a more fitting name. but it's prolly to late for that; once a name sticks, it is stuck.
>BarbieErnst likes to watch "current culture" movies, so he can do educated shit posts about them.
No.6368
>>6364The origin of the phrase is not german but french, so if that was a direct quote from the film I'll have to assume the rest of the research is shabby as well.
Also, have you really taken out the phone in the cinema to post on EC?
No.6396
>>6346This is a movie for neurotypicals but he has Oppenheimer's syndrome.
No.6398
>>6368> The origin of the phrase is not german but french, so if that was a direct quote from the filmErnst might have made a mistake in the transcript, but is pretty sure that it was said like that in the movie.
inb4: it is a well documented mistake Oppenheimer made.
> Also, have you really taken out the phone in the cinema to post on EC?of course not. i brought my whole tower.
No.6399 KONTRA
>>6398too lazy to install ffmpg and cut/upload the relevant part.
it's at ~30mi; before they fuck.
No.7158
>>7150Hey, another one who watches Dave Filonis wet dream? I salute you, fellow sufferer of the Disney virus.
I'm at episode 4, which I enjoyed for the most part. Ep3 had some pretty good scenes as well and I have to say Rosario Dawson works well for me as Ahsoka, but overall this show is mostly "meh" so far.
The ending of 4 got me excited however, and I'm giving it a chance yet.
Andor was the best thing that the SW-Disney-machine ever produced and it only started to get really interesting (for me) in episode 4.
But wait, why do I watch stuff I don't generally like, you may ask... escapism, I guess. And since I hate super-hero stuff with a hot, fiery passion, my vice turns out to be Star Wars. Though I'm too afraid to tell people when I found a gem amidst the shit for lo' and behold it means I dug through the shit to find the gem.
No.7545
>>7158> I salute you, fellow sufferer of the Disney virus.Althou the organization is cancer, it is undeniably a big player... and big players naturally draw talents :/
sometimes the talent can shine thru all the shit the orga throws at them.
i would agree: so far Ahsoka seems "meh"/10.
If you are into futuristic stuff: did you watch "Altered Carbon"?
That one is really gud; would recommend/10.
.
just watched the first minute of deadloch and laughed my ass off.
girl is enjoying lecker jointje.
stumbles over a corpse at beach.
> pic.png ignore the magic-selection-border-fail> Oh, Shit! His dick is on fire.might be a good series; aussie stuff.
just because i am currently remembering it: "the outlaws" from england was funny/enjoyable as well; good for light escapism/10.
No.7608
Okay, that was utter trash. There were maybe, like, three funny jokes in the whole movie, and the rest is "insult" "humor" (which sometimes approaches being funny, but still fails to actually be funny), idiotic puns (most of which you can actually see coming, and the rest are still shitty) and physical comedy (which is slightly better than insults and puns, but only because you can't really fuck up the physical comedy as bad as verbal comedy), none of which were able to make me smile, let alone laugh. I have no idea why do people claim that it is one of the funniest movies ever made (sometimes even the funniest! Now that's completely insane), but I suspect that they are just parroting movie critics (who are usually full of shit) in order to look smarter than they actually are. It's one of the most overrated movies I have ever seen, and easily the most overrated comedy movie.
No.7609
>>7608For comparison, how do you rate Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel & Hardy?
No.7611
>>7609Not very familiar with Laurel and Hardy (planning to look into them more eventually, as well as inot Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges), and I have only seen one Buster Keaton movie (The General, which was pretty good), but Chaplin's stuff that I've seen (The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and even The Great Dictator, which I didn't really like) is way funnier than Duck soup, possibly because it was mostly physical comedy, and it was physical comedy done well. It's just impossible to make puns funny (it's possible for wordplay, but it's actually pretty hard).
No.7612
>>7611I see.
Yeah, I agree mostly. But american comedy (after silent movies ofc) relies on puns/wordplay about 90% of the time, so it's to be expected to have a lot of that.
No.7613
>>7612Why couldn't they make them visual puns instead of verbal puns, I wonder? Visual puns work pretty well, at least Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker could make them work. Verbal puns just feel as if they have no punchline, it's just "ha-ha, these two words sound the same, ha-ha-ha". Or the insults; I believe the insult/roast comedy for some reason is popular in the US, but I only know two people who manage to make it funny: Don Rickles and Ricky Gervais (and he's not even an American!). The parts that were funny for me in Duck Soup were non-verbal (motorcycle car, Harpo destroying the radio, and the mirror scene), so I think if the movie had more of these instead of puns and insults it would be pretty decent, but unfortunately we have what we have.
No.7614
>>7613Visual puns are very hard, wordplay is, especially in english, incredibly easy.
Plus, for visual gags you need to pay attention, so half the audience would probably miss them (which is why Police Squad! was cancelled so quickly, because people didn't pay attention to the TV and missed half of the jokes). Plus, the lenses and film at that time really weren't as developed as in the 80s.
No.7615
>>7614Yeah, I guess movie executives are going for the lowest common denominator when attention spans are concerned. As for wordplay being easy, I don't agree, simply because I tend to differentiate wordplay and puns (well, puns are a kind of wordplay, strictly speaking, but they are the worst kind). Wordplay (excluding puns) works with meaning and interpretation, and it can be used to provide some interesting punchlines, especially if you manage to tie it in the context somehow, so it does require some skill and wit. Puns just replace one word with a similarly sounding another, disregarding meaning, context and just overall appropriateness, so they basically become verbal non-sequiturs in the end (not that there's anything wrong with non-sequiturs, it's just that they don't really work with words, IMO, unless you go for completely absurdist shit). For example, Bugs Bunny's joke that he never studied law when he violated the laws of physics does work, because it's a play on the actual meaning of the word with an unexpected punchline, while Chico's "joke" about "dollars, taxes" — "Dallas, Texas" doesn't, because it's just a lolsorandum switching of similar-sounding words. Sure, you can make wordplay easily, the difficult (and, in puns' case, almost impossible) thing is to make it actually funny.
No.7626
Who is worse: The Seinfeld crew or The Gilmore Girls?
No.7627
>>7626As people?
The Seinfeld people. I mean, they made the fact that they're all assholes even the finale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MECtoQ9YL3QThe Gilmore Girls would be super annoying people, but did they ever do anything really bad? I only saw a few episodes but i don't think they were ever portraied to be bad people.
No.7628
>>7627>I only saw a few episodes but i don't think they were ever portraied to be bad people.No, they were not *portrayed* as bad people, but I catch a bit of the episodes right now, and for example the daughter has been leading on her bf while pulling a will-they-won't-they with some other guy, and she's supposed to be 18 or something and not the kind of person who would do something like that.
Even Ross and Rachel weren't that bad. God how I hate Ross and Rachel.
No.8742
Bump.
I’ll go to a cozy comedy film festival next week. Had a very good experience with the selection from last year, I’m really excited.
No.8851
Barbie
Cool, funny and original. Barbie and Gosling are such a cuties. Movie acts like it's trying to teach me something but I failed to see a comprehensible message.
8/10
Oppenheimer
Only checked clocks twice during the movie and it was solely because I wanted to piss. Impressive that they managed to make a movie from research work and bureaucratic intrigues. Makes you want to read Wikipedia about the events and find out whether that guy in glasses really was as ebil as they show him.
7/10
No.8899
>>8851I share both your opinion and your scores for these films. I was a bit shocked to find Barbie more enjoyable than Oppenheimer, while still liking Oppenheimer quite a bit.
I'd say Barbie has quite clear messages, but they are directed mostly at american (and americanised european) audiences. For everone else it's a fun comedy.
I'm actually tempted to watch it again just because of Robbie, Gosling and Michael Cera.
The facial expressions of Gosling when Barbie declares she has no vagina and the ensuing scene had me on the floor. Few films manage to make me laugh that hard. No.8907
>>8898Yeah, Mandy is "70s/80s horror homage" done right.
The colors are reminiscent of e.g. Suspiria, they use squibs and other practical effects and the atmosphere is really out there.
I wouldn't necessarily call it one-dimensional, but it's certainly nothing for high-brow sherry drinkers.
Plus, Andrea Riseborough is cute, CUTE!
No.8958
Oh hell yea!
Do you guys enjoy movies diving unapologetically into a specific subculture? Something like
This is England,
Bomb City or
This Must be the Place?
For some reason I really, really enjoy watching those, even if I have no connection to these subcultures. And now I've learned about a new one that's going to be about a subculture that I actually do have some connection to:
Hardcore Never Dies:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hq3OBqvMzKE (
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hq3OBqvMzKE )
No.8962
>>8958It totally makes sense for it to be part of current years rotation. Which year is it set?
But I would probably not watch it albeit I would really like to know more about the history of dutch drug trading, smuggling and production. But how much can it deliver this and go beyond what I already know. This seems like a mix of "raver" and "narcos" the ladder being a staple in a lot of shows these days.
Trailer made me think of Rise of the Footsoldier probably because of the taking pills in the club scenes and organized crime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU-LBxSub0Q No.8974
>>8962According to the trailer it's set in 1996.
>Rise of the FootsoldierNever heard of that one, seems interesting enough to be worth a watch on a slow evening.
No.8987
>>8974I only remember the club scene
they did not show the soft porn fucking after the club because of the feeling of MDMA I got to know later on and because I liked the music. Even bought the Vinyl of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANpqZbIRP8 No.9086
>>9079I am fairly certain that had I watched the first Halloween back in the day when it came out, I would have soiled my pants.
Apart from that, there really isn't anything I find particularly "scary". Maybe some implications and themes like the zombie girl killing her mother in Night of the living Dead, or Coraline from an adult perspective when it's suddenly about your kid just vanishing, or Kairo for the crushing loneliness.
No.9336
Russian Civil War. Two young people — Andrey and Yarinka — live in village Malinovka in Ukraine. They are in love and are going to marry. Unfortunately for them, Grytzko, son of a local kulak who now calls himself Pan Ataman Grizian Tavricheskiy, returns home with a gang of one and a half hundred bandits to capture the village. He wants Yarinka for himself and tries to force her, but she's having none of it and runs away. She meets a cavalry troop of Red Army soldiers and tells them about Grizian. They now have to figure out how to deal with bandits who have them outnumbered.
If the description seemed kinda serious, I apologize. It's actually a very lighthearted musical comedy, a simple "good guys vs. bad guys" story, but with a lot of singing and dancing. Villains, even Grizian who pretty much almost rapes Yarinka, are not really menacing but actually goofy, and despite that there are some action scenes, there aren't many killings and they are bloodless, and the story, of course, ends with a completely happy end for the good guys. Interestingly, while the story focuses on Andrey, Yarinka, Grizian, Yarinka's mother Sofya and Red Army commander Nazar Duma, most hilarious and memorable moments of the movie are actually provided by the side characters: village elder grandpa Nechipor (a bolshevik sympathizer who waits for the Red Army to liberate the village from bandits), Yashka the artilleryman (a WWI veteran who is coming home to a neighboring village, but decides to stay in Malinovka upon finding that his village was burned down by Petliura's soldiers) and Grizian's aide-de-camp Popandopulo (a thief from Odessa with a love for loot and tacky clothes). Every time any of these are on the screen, they effortlessly steal the scene from the main characters.
What I didn't really like is that each actor has a professional singer singing songs instead of them (except Yashka and Popandopulo, but they are purely comedic characters and so their songs are comedic too). It was pretty much the standard for Soviet musical movies, but I still find the huge contrast between the normal and the singing voices of character jarring, and often bad lip-sync doesn't help matters either. The songs themselves are still good though.
No.9384
Isn't it a shame that Kafka never got any treatment by german expressionism?
In fact when watching Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, I actually thought "yes, this is exactly how I imagined the offices and courtrooms".
Wouldn't it be cool to make a silent film after one of Kafka's stories?
No.9510
Pretty good film. I didn't expect to like it a lot but i really did.
7,5/10 - Would watch again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETiSMS4i1asAlso, it seems they make a videogame right now which looks really bad.
No.10310
Have you watched "The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq"? I cannot find where to download it with Russian or English subtitles. The best I found is torrent that would download in 12 days but the only seeder disappeared and it stalled =(
What am I missing?
No.10365
To imagine that a Napoleon movie is made by anglos is pissing me off.
Based on the trailer he seems to be portrayed as an old grumpy dude. He was not old grumpy dude. He was a charismatic leader. I’ll restrain from watching this disgusting piece of Anglo propaganda.
No.10368
>>10365>To imagine that a Napoleon movie is made by anglos is pissing me off.This your first historical movie rodeo?
That said,
RIDLEY SCOTT IS A FUCKING HACK AND BOTH GOOD FILMS HE MADE WERE GOOD ONLY BY ACCIDENT
No.10369
>>10368> This your first historical movie rodeo?I think the only anglo historical movies I watched, at least the only pre-twentieth century history would be Barry Lindon an Amadeus that were both quite alright and even really good. Though I see why people could get pissed off at Amadeus if it’s seen as a historical movie.
I tend to mostly watch French historical movies, they have a shit load of it. My favorite so far is ridicule. It’s a classic about a country noble going to Versailles under Louis the 16th to get funds for draining a local swamp and learning the codes and power game there that are mostly of wit appearances and making your enemies ridicule themselves.
No.10381 KONTRA
I kinda wanna go and see Napoleon now. I don’t want to drag my family along but I also don’t really know anyone who could watch it with me. Is it okay to go to the cinema alone?
No.10382
>>10381Go for it. Going with someone is fun when you can discuss it afterwards etc, but going alone is a different experience. I think you tend to feel more immersed and pay more attention to the movie, also feel more like a part of the audience rather than the group/person you came with.
No.10383 KONTRA
>>10381No, everyone will notice and they will probably spend 2 hours thinking why is this weirdo here alone. This will negatively impact their cinema experience, please be understanding and torrent the movie when you're able to.
No.10387
>>10383> please be understanding and torrent the movie when you're able toYet another movie ruined by incels.
You WILL go to cinema.
No.10463
Has Ernst seen The Bear?
Best series I've seen in a while. Pretty simple setup with the main character being an up-and-coming but emotionally stunted star chef who decides to take over his dead brother's failing restaurant. It's executed so well - great writing, lots of local Chicago flavor, great chemistry between the actors, cool music choices, snappy pace. 100% recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-cqqAJIXhs No.10466
>>10463Yes, it was one of my highlights in 2022 and 2023, season 1 and 2 respectively.
That one episode in season 2 (I believe it is ep. 6 or 7) that is longer than all the others even though it only shows the progression of one family evening, was some of the best cinema I have ever seen.
No.10622
I've started to watch a short series called Blue Eye Samurai. I have enjoyed the first two episodes enough that I want to tell Ernst about it.
It's very stylish and very restrained (for something coming out of netflix).
The story is a classic revenge story at heart, at least so far.
There is subtle humor that plays on a non-verbal level through the animation, but there is also a comedic reliev character. The latter is a mixed bag for me, as I do like the circumstances and the role, but the comic trait seems enforced most of the time. To be fair though, this is as much playing into Japanese tropes as it is playing into US tropes - I'm just a bit tired of it.
Do not watch the trailer, it mis-represents the character of the show and tries to appear to "certain audiences".
Apparently Netflix have uploaded the whole first episode to Youtube, so maybe check that out if you are curious:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Cm73ma6Ibcs (
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cm73ma6Ibcs )
No.10686
>>103102.9% of "The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq" has been downloaded so far. That's 250 more days to wait at this rate. Is this what my ancestors fought for at Borodino? I'm going to cry.
No.10689
Right after I wrote this post...
The seeder came and shared entire 10% with me before disappearing. I'll prevent my laptop from going to sleep for 24 hours. And will track times when the seeder is online (qbittorrent has plots of download speed).
No.10695 KONTRA
>>10689> qbittorrentis it good? i recently looked for a decent client. landed on transmission after testing a few.
https://www.qbittorrent.org/https://transmissionbt.com/ No.10698
>>8899>I'd say Barbie has quite clear messages, but they are directed mostly at american (and americanised european) audiences.Something about 3-rd wave feminism vs 2-nd wave feminism?
>>10390Why is it so important to show something to incel losers? Why not unemployed losers? Or handicapped losers?
>>10695Yes, qbittorrent is good. I'm fully satisfied.
Update: found the movie in HD with English subtitles online.
No.10702
>>10698>Update: found the movie in HD with English subtitles online.Damn. I saw your post last night and thought I could be a good samaritan, so I acquired it before going to bed. Planned on sharing it with you today and then spent like 30 minutes lying awake trying to come up with the best way to share a larger file with an Ernst without exposing myself to the risk of getting hit by a thermonuclear copyright missile...
My conclusion was either using IPFS or an ephemeral http server as hidden onion service.
Oh well, if you no longer need it I might just watch it myself.
No.10715
>>10702That's sad. Thanks a lot anyway!
> Oh well, if you no longer need it I might just watch it myself.Don't forget to share your impressions in the thread. I expect it to be shit but I'm craving to watch anyway because I'm the writer's fanboy.
No.10950 KONTRA
>>10715It's even worse than I thought. Nothing happens at all and no one told them that comedy is supposed to be funny.
But I'll watch the sequel anyway. Later, for now tired of the old fuck.
No.11914
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The first squad
What is better, anime or veterans? Why not both? "The first squad" tells about supersecret team of teenagers fighting against Teuton knights resurrected by Ahnenerbe. It has regular interjections with war veterans, historians and other experts all of them are actors, who are providing historical and psychiatric context. It's absolutely b-movie tier with orthodox monk kungfu fighting two titty nazi spies and so on. Meanwhile it has nice and unusual story and is drawn prettily.
9/10
No.11975
>>11914You have piqued my curiosity, thanks.
No.12192
Over the past weeks I have been watching the "Universal monsters", featuring the monsters appearing in Universal's monster films in the 30s to 50s. The box contains Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, The Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Overall they were enjoyable, although, despite liking old films, I find them to be rather overrated, in the sense of "yeah, it's classics, but from today's perspective they're not THAT special anymore". Compared to something like Nosferatu or Metropolis or Frau im Mond, or even Freaks, if we stay in the US.
I my opinion it's mainly due to the very "studio control" atmosphere they have, and how oftentimes "choppy" the plot advances. Might have been budget constraints, too.
I will try to rank them.
>Dracula
Bela Lugosi is good, but the obvious rubber bats, as well as having opossums and armadillos in his castle (in Transsylvania), as well as Jonathan Harker being a bit of a dummy, lead to some unintentionally comedic moments, but it's nice to understand more of there references in Dead and Loving it. Oh, and it wasn't based on the book, but on a stage play based on the book. Frankly, I found it rather boring.
>Frankenstein
This one lacks a bit the inner life of the creature (granted, hard to convey on screen, but Karloff adds a lot to it) and makes Frankenstein a more sympathetic character.
>The Mummy
This is an interesting one. Karloff is even sadder than the creature here, and I still haven't quite understood his plan for getting his loved one back.
>The Invisible Man
As funny (intentionally) as it's scary. By modern standards the explanation for the invisibility is equally as silly as "cosmic rays reanimate the dead" from Night of the Living Dead, but that shouldn't detract from what is a very interesting film, and Claude Rains with his remarkable voice really makes a splendid madman.
>Bride of Frankenstein
Wasted potential. The creature now gets its humanization with the blind man in the hut (from the book) while Frankenstein gets a very good antagonist. I found the framing device pretty cool with the Shelleys and Lord Byron being together and Mary telling the "sequel" to the story. However, here it's also a rather disjointed story, and a scene where the antagonist presents a bunch of homunculi is very silly. I am not fully convinced if the humor was intended or if they just wanted to show off some special effects. All in all there were a lot of great ideas joined by jank.
>Phantom of the Opera
Dude goes crazy, starts killing people to help the woman he has a (not necessarily romantic) infatuation with. It's basically a musical because it's set in and around an opera and for that it's pretty good, but everything else is rather harmless.
>The Wolf Man
Another good premise, with a pretty good ending, but executed in such a disjointed way, plus the main woman is a SLUT!
>Creature from the Black Lagoon
This one's pretty cool, it gives an adventure feel, the dread from what lurks beneath and Julie Adams was smoking.
To rate them I certainly take Creature as my favorite, then Invisible Man, Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Bride, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Dracula
No.12198
Watched
and wrote a term paper on Wolf Warrior 2. Unabashed nationalist jingoism wrapped in B-movie action aesthetics, yet it's very fun, recommend it big time if you like action films and/or want to see what one of the domestically highest grossing Chinese movies looks like.
>>12192Noice, I've only seen Frankenstein and Phantom of the Opera so far, but eventually intend to watch them all too. The Black Cat with Bela and Karloff is also pretty cool (and barely over an hour long).
No.12866
Taras Bulba (2009)
Historical movie about cossack Bulba, his family and more general -- Ukrainian rebellion against Polish rule in XVIII century. The movie is aiming rather for epic propaganda than realism, but not too much and doesn't break suspension of disbelief.
It's based on Nicolay Gogol's book and follows it pretty close.
Enjoyed pretty much everything: plot and characters, battle scenes, costumes and backgrounds, dashing Cossacks, beautiful Polish ladies, "o kurwy syny vi".
P.S. turns out, there is a Bollywood adaptation, where Poles are replaced with Brits, and Ukrainians -- with Indians. But its plot is very different judging by Wikipedia.
P.P.S. Damn, now I need to rewatch "Braveheart" and "Jeanne d'Arc"
No.12951
A biopic of the famous eccentric industrialist Howard Hughes starting from the late twenties of the 20th century when he was filming his movie Hell's Angels and ending with the maiden flight of his plane H-4 Hercules in 1947. It tells about Hughes' passion for both movies and aviation, his relationships with women (in particular with Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner), his confrontation with Juan Trippe, owner of the Pan American Airways, Hughes' main competitor in civil air transportation, and senator Owen Brewster, Trippe's lapdog. The film is pretty much flawless, and it's no wonder, since it's a Scorsese movie (so far I haven't yet seen a bad movie by Martin Scorsese, and I have a suspicion that there simply aren't any). Some casting choices were questionable, a lot of actors don't look like the people they're supposed to be playing at all, but they deliver such convincing performances (especially Cate Blanchett who is absolutely awesome as Katharine Hepburn), that I'm willing to forgive everything.
No.12996 KONTRA
>>12198I didn't watch it. But from what I've heard at least it's not dogmatic propaganda joykiller or shallow self-exoticizing pieces that cater to european film festivals. Before Wu Jing, not many pictures were shoot with us chinese proles in mind. I think that's the redeeming quality of nationalistic slop.
No.13054
>>12951I kinda disliked Shutter Island.
Maybe they wanted you to know that there will be a big twist at the end and what that twist will be, but that made the whole explanation at the end unnecessary.
No.13063
>>13054Eh, I thought it was okay. And I think it was the movie that made me take DiCaprio as an actor seriously, because before it I just knew him as the pretty boy from Titanic and actively avoided all movies with him, suspecting them of being some sort of chick flicks.
If I had to pick the Scorsese movie that I like the least out of those that I watched so far, it would probably be Mean Streets. It's not bad by any measure, it just wasn't as interesting as others, and also De Niro's character was really unlikable. Harvey Keitel was pretty cool though.
No.13149 KONTRA
>>13063You are a homo, you know that, right?
No.13616
>>13615Destroyer was a quick cash grab to tap into the success of Barbarian, but where Barbarian was layered and more subtle, Destroyer is basically a party RPG movie. You have all the different classes, dungeons and a (pretty cool imo) final boss monster. I was also surprised by how short Grace Jones is, I always thought she was over 1,90.
What I disliked most about it was that they reused the music from Barbarian, which is kinda silly because Barbarian was pretty operatic, with clear influences from Wagner and Prokowjew (e.g. regarding the music of Alexander Newski), so everyone had their leitmotif and pictures and music where pretty synched and did most of the storytelling, whereas in Destroyer it was just... there.
Also, Terminator is basically a low-budget sci-fi horror, so obviously it would have less of a budget than a PG-rated adventure film. Cameron had done what by then? Piranhas 2 or 3 or some schlock like that, whereas Destroyer had the director of 20k Leagues under the Sea.
Have you watched Red Sonja yet? I liked it more than Destroyer because it has cute girls (yes, Brigitte Nielsen was cute, CUTE!) and silly humor and this particular 80s-emancipation "women can do everything men can" attitude all over it.
No.13617
>>13616>Have you watched Red Sonja yet?That's next, and after that i probably re-watch Commando.
No.13618
>>13617>and after that i probably re-watch Commando.Excellent choice. Have you watched Raw Deal btw? Arnie plays a wisecracking, quipping undercover agent.
The film is pretty silly, but in a fun way, and it has a quarry shootout to "I can't get no satisfaction".
No.13620
>>13618>Raw DealI think i have, but that must've been 15 or 20 years or so ago.
No.13621
>>13620Frankly, the only reason I watched it less than years ago is because I randomly found it in a bargain bin at Media Markt, along with Manhunter and Demolition Man. Fucking plebs man...
No.13652
Film archive reopened with bigger rooms and screens. Bliss
No.13864
>>13772>Communist propaganda, extremely well-made.Why did you even feel the need to point this out?
No.13865
>>13864Because it's a rather precise description of the film.
No.13876
I read an article about the morality and entertainment censorship committee of the Vaud municipal police in the 1920s. It's amusing to note that censorship was the role of the cantons in Switzerland, then, according to the annual reports, the police relied on the judgment of the cinephile sections of the local newspapers for their work as censors.
A cool anecdote is the moment when the police prefect explains the non-censorship of a film in response to a citizen's complaint, explaining that the film's realism, particularly during a suicide scene, was part of the director's artistic will and visual identity. Censorship would therefore be inappropriate.
No.14266 KONTRA
>>14265On the one hand, it's expected to like Apocalypto because it is indeed good, on the other hand I can't take anyone seriously who uses terms like "slop".
I am conflicted here.
No.14333
Watching the TNG episode where Geordie finally meets Lea Brahms in person hits way too close to home. It's painful to watch.
Why did the writers hate my boy so much?
No.14403 KONTRA
>calling Christian fundamentalist film goyslop
Genius meta irony
No.14404 KONTRA
>>14403> Christian fundamentalist filmI mean, you're about as retarded as him, so...
No.14457
I pity everyone who didn't get to watch Soviet cartoons growing up tbh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3yhBEQlH_YJust remembered this one and it's so perfect. Witty dialogue, incredible voiceover, cute animation
No.14462 KONTRA
>>14404I am convinced the movies ending is unironical. Fight me to death about it.
No.14463
>>14462>I am convinced the movies ending is unironical.What is the "unironical" ending?
No.14467
>>14463Back then there was a dispute whether the way the arrival of the conquistadores was depicted meant to symbolize christians bringing civilisation to the barbaric maya culture with its human sacrifices.
No.14468
>>14457Where are you from?
Nikita? :DYes, it's genuinely funny even for adult and the bear is drawn very cute.
No.14469
>>14467Yes, I know, and it was all problem hairs at a time when Gibson was a persona non grata in Hollywood anyway and it was hip hating on him.
For anyone with more than two brain cells (and who actually watched the film) it's clear that the europeans arriving as the last harbinger of the prophesized apocalypse were not presented as a good thing. It takes a special kind of brainfried culture warrior idiot to think that it was.
It's about the same tier or retardation as the other side calling LotR woke because Eowyn kills the Witch King of Angmar.
No.14535
Just watched Wild at Heart. Haven't gotten LYNCHED this hard before, and I can't even tell why.
No.14727 KONTRA
>>14726Oh yeah, not to mention the soundtrack is pretty legendary, actually one of the best-selling
albums of all time, not too surprising when the movie starts with a banger like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVEqy6K18Yo No.14746
Nice little documentary on 2021 LAPD fireworks explosion
mishap. Appears to only be using public footage, but tells the story well. Runtime ~19 minutes.
When The LAPD Blows Up Your Neighborhood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n7Gx2Tr4Ag No.14747
>>14746>LADPHave they ever not fucked up.
And has there been a documentary about the cornered Dorner yet?
No.15454
FInally got around watching DUNC
Better than expected. Especially in the beginning when seemingly every shot showed another actor I've only seen in capeshit trailers lately and realized that I HATE modern hollywood actors I was pretty sceptical, but throughout its runtime, it grew on me.
It was less "spectacular" in the sense of the word than I expected and while the bombastic-for-bombasts-sake shots looked silly at times, as well as the "mass" battle scenes, at least the effects looked better than what I've seen in capeshit trailers.
The only thing that really bothered me is that Zendaya girl. She looks like an actual neanderthal and has that typical idiotic american conceited facial expression and is supposed to be what? His love interest? Not even with a rented dick. And it was a travesty that we got to see the boy's twink back but not Rebecca's (watch Mission Impossible 4 for that; you can thank me later).
If I can convince gf I would like to watch the second part too because I actually want to know what happens next. How are the books btw? I heard it's a lot of political thriller stuff.
No.15455
>>15454If Zendaya bothered you in the first one, the second one will make you write a manifesto
No.15456
>>15455I think I said all I had to say. If I can deal with the main actress in Hellraiser and Susanne Lothar, I can deal with this creature, too. Except if the film is bad, in that case I will write a polemic rant.
No.15460
Do you know the filmmaker jia zhang-ke ? He’s apparently coming to Switzerland for a few projection as the invited to a documentary film festival. His movies seem to be the bomb. I already bought tickets months ago
No.15465
>>15454Do you mean DUNE?
You should watch the David Lynch movie.
It's way more fun.
And it has Captain Picard.
No.15468
>>15454Oh, I just planned to watch DUNC on this weekend.
I love Lynch's Dune. I accidentally saw its epic ending on TV when I was a child and was very impressed and thought about it for years until I found name of the movie as a teenager. But I don't like other Lynch's movies. And Lynch doesn't like his Dune.
No.15472
>>15465Wasn't available. I was a bit wary of it because it's shorter than this one with more things happening, and I didn't feel this one particularly slow or drawn-out (like e.g. The Hobbit).
It's certainly on my list because I usually enjoy Lynch films.
No.15491
GF is currently watching Monk. We're at season 4 right now. And while it's ok, I can't understand why it's so well-received among critics.
It's even more formulaic than Dr. House, which would be ok if it was at least tonally consistent.
But it's not and instead it's constantly flip-flopping between a tortured man hanging on to his past, some heartfelt dramatic moments, the humor arising from the premise up to right-out silly moments that you'd expect from something like Naked Gun (although better written). And those parts just don't fit together to form an endearing whole.
I must admit, I missed it during its initial run, so it might be some of "you have to have been there" thing, but just like with the Sopranos I just don't get the appeal.
No.15588 KONTRA
>>15474He was right next to me and I thought he was just a chinaman. I could’ve asked for pictures…
No.15589
>>15588"Chinaman" is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
No.15597
I liked the movie less than I though I would. It was still pretty good. "A touch of Sin", it was based on news items of Chinese people resorting to violence but a bit fictionalized. Four stories in total : I the first one a guy goes rogue and kills the responsible of a dubious case of privatization of a mine with a shotgun. The second is about a man that kills three teens who tried to rob him on the road, fills alive again from this act, goes back to his family, realizes he doesn’t feel anything and go kill two middle classes rob them and tries to flee China. Th third is a girl who gets mistreated by a bunch of people and cuts the throat of a guy who wanted her to pay her for sex. The final one is about a young man whose broke and flees his job to get a new one as a waiter in a brothel, falls in love with a prostitute, she rejects him and tells him she has a kid. He quits his job, has to tell to his mom his dubious financial status, her mom is mean with him, his coworkers find him back and hustle him a bit. He jumps and kys
I’d say that the movie presents violence as the last mean of self expression of an oppressed individual. Sometimes it’s heroic. Chinese taxi driver, the nuance is brought with the last case where violence is fled from by self infliction.
The interview with Jia Zhangke at the end was catastrophic. The Swiss film archive struggles already with English interviews. We barely got what the guy tried to say. Small man, very introverted looking, smol hands. I looked at him and he looked at me, I smiled.
No.15603
Watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Another Western masterpiece by John Ford, the guy just doesn't miss.
>>15588Lmao
>>15597>A Touch of SinYeah, it's cool but not my favorite from him either, I think the Pickpocket/Platform/Unknown Pleasures trilogy of his early work is his best, a bit raw but more authentic and personal, more concerned with actually capturing the time & place than catering to an international arthouse audience.
>violence as the last mean of self expression of an oppressed individual. Sometimes it’s heroic.That went over my head a bit when I've seen it, but it also connects to the jianghu tradition (basically righteous outlaws) in Chinese wuxia fiction. The English title is even a play on a classic wuxia film called A Touch of Zen (the Chinese titles bear no relation).
>Small man, very introverted looking, smol hands. I looked at him and he looked at me, I smiled.That's the kind of details I like to hear, haha
No.15606 KONTRA
>>15603To ask him for a picture would’ve been distasteful, I remembered I had a big red sun on my t-shirt from the Japan Olympics.
>wuxia fiction Yea it goes further, I think the movie is doted with plays about rightful outlaws
No.15960
>Dragged Across Concrete
Bought the DVD on a whim some years ago, never got around watching it, but I did now.
The main menu and intro promise some criminal flick in the tradition of those classics like Dirty Harry, Bullitt or even Death Wish, but against this, Dirty Harry is straight-up uplifting. In fact, I am currently listening to Die Doofen to get in a bit lighter mood.
Basically every character in this story is crooked, bad or otherwise depraved, except for the kids and Vince Vaughn's character's girlfriend.
At times it tries too hard to be emotionally manipulative, like the episode with the bank teller's private life (which reminded me of a similar episode from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns), which then kinda falls flat because this director is no Spielberg. Some dialogues are also a bit too on-the-nose, but I guess it fits the assholish nature of the characters.
As for the action sequences, there's only a handful of them, but they are of a very high quality - brutal and intense, and I think they even used squibs here and there.
It's not some high-energy speedy undertaking - in fact it runs for over two and a half hours - but very slow, everything is deliberate, at times it's more like an episodic film that just shows different events that just happen to be connected.
And in the end, it's more of a downer one, depending on how you answer for yourself question of "did they deserve it?" and "were those sacrifices necessary?".
I certainly didn't feel the long runtime, but I also don't know if I would watch it again, it's just too "heavy" for me.
No.15974
Watched a swedish mini-series on arte.tv over the weekend. It's marketed as "Dreaming of England" in Germany, but I think its original title is "Sommaren 85" and it is set during the summer of 1985, who would have thought.
Setting: The very close-knit fictitious small town of Braxinge. The spirit of Jante is still strong here. Main industry: a printing house that prints porn magazines. The local hockey team was successful during the early 70s/late 60s.
Personae Dramatis:
- Lena, a teenager dreaming of a language holiday in England, still plays with dolls with her best friend Sussie.
- Åsa, Lena's single mother, in her early thirties. Had sex with the entire hockey-team once. Known as the town-slut. Has not had sex in 15 years.
- Barbro, in her early sixties, Lena's grandmother, Åsa's overbearing mother. Organizer of town meetings, volunteers as a lunch lady at the high school cafeteria. Has not had sex in decades.
- Stickan, in his early sixties, Barbro's husband, Åsa's father, Lena's grandfather. Submissive to his wife, rejects her sexually.
- Sussi, a teenager, Lena's best friend, daughter of the owner of the printing house.
- Örjan, in his early thirties, gym-teacher, a closet homosexual, later a friend of Åsa. Very good-looking, charismatic, friendly and caring. Very sexually promiscuous
- Max, a teenager. An outsider, used by his communist mother to distribute communist propaganda.
- Bengt, in his mid thirties. A dentist. Lena's estranged father.
- Pimple-Magnus, Jonny-Dick, Sweet Malin: teenagers
- Ju-Anita, Janne, Svenne, etc: townspeople
What's inside:
Clichés, lots of them. Many jokes that have been played a few times too often. (lol, everyone thinks she's dating him, but he's homosex, lol woman wants sex but man doesn't, it's supposed to be the other way round, etc...)
Still treats its protagonists with empathy.
Sets and wardrobe work very well.
A love story for every generation.
What SVT may have been thinking when they greenlit this production:
Gen-Xers, nostalgic for your small-town-youth when the streets were full of saab 9000, volvo 240 and road-cycles? Back when there were no gang-shootings and gang-handgranades and gang-bombs? Tired of all the crisis and bad news? We will give you your nostalgia, but we will also show you that the 80s sucked, because single mothers were judged for letting the entire hockey-team fuck them, homosexuals were repressed beacause everyone was scared of AIDS, everyone was talking about everyone behind their back, and porn was distributed in magazines! Now, please don't go for the memberberries too hard, and please stop voting for SD!
Rating:
Rate 6/10. Slightly above regional TV Sunday evening tier.
No.15991
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Good movie, especially for teenagers. The visuals are great. Costumes, dragonfly vehicles, levitating Sardaukars ... wow. Harkonnens are less of cool badasses though.
Making two movies (compared to one Lynch's) allowed to make more subtle and in-depth view at the expense of epicness. But old movie is more aesthetically consistent or something. And has navigators!
No.15993
>>15454> She looks like an actual neanderthalShe is hot, especially for a mutt. Paul's mommy is hotter ofc.
> and has that typical idiotic american conceited facial expressionYeah, she somewhat follows a Hollywood archetype of "strong and competent constantly butthurt woman"
No.16016
>>15993>neanderthalIt's not about her looks, rather her horrible, I might even say non-present acting skills, as if they couldn't find a better actress for the role. And, as you've mentioned, the unsatisfied, yet "I'm stronk" grunt on her face doesn't help
No.16118
>>16016Who's the best actress? The one that is best at sucking the correct dicks. They all willingly suck massive amounts of schlong, they swallow, and than, they say "thank you", the whores. Decades later, contribute dissonance over the massive amount of cock they sucked and the realization that all those cocks are now right years old folks them with disgust. They then decide that they must have been raped. No other way they would ever suck such an old farts disgusting shrimpled up duck right? (They forget that the old fart was decades younger back then, because like all women, they are too dumb for that.)
That's what happens when women are not kept in their place.
No.16129
>>16118You've overreacted a TINY bit. Yes, Hollywood mostly worked through dick sucking, so that even mediocre actresses like Scarlett Johansson can be main characters in multibillion franchises. It doesn't negate the fact that there's still positive selection going, and there's a variety of at least decent ones to choose from.