Movie opinions thread (what have you seen, what did you think?)

[NeoSneth]

Vast of Night
on Amazon Prime. Good if you are a film critic. Long single cuts for most of the movie, which is neat if you pay attention to those things. Interesting choice of dialogue and setting. It's good, but not popcorn movie material.


You should have left
Kevin Bacon in a pretty standard horror movie. It's a lot of -- What's real vs what's in his head. or is it all real?!?! It's put together well, but I wouldn't brag about it. I didn't get the sense of dread they were going for. I liked the ending fwiw.

 

[evil wasabi]

Vast of Night
on Amazon Prime. Good if you are a film critic. Long single cuts for most of the movie, which is neat if you pay attention to those things. Interesting choice of dialogue and setting. It's good, but not popcorn movie material.


You should have left
Kevin Bacon in a pretty standard horror movie. It's a lot of -- What's real vs what's in his head. or is it all real?!?! It's put together well, but I wouldn't brag about it. I didn't get a sense the sense of dread they were going for. I liked the ending fwiw.

I gave up on You Should have Left half way through. Not for the creepiness, but because the concept of this vengeful spirit rubbed me wrong in the wake of a poor child suffering for the sins of the father, at least as far as I saw it. If a spirit is good, it wouldn't involve a child. I do think Amanda Seyfried is still nice to look at, even in her most boring roles.

 

[NeoSneth]

She is good to look at. can confirm..
I think it comes together in the end. Tho I had a hard time following the part of the story line you mentioned as well.

 

[wyo]

So it turns out that my daughter has a big time love affair with horror films. A month of so ago, Nightmare on Elm Street came up so we watched the original. Last weekend, she expressed the want to watch Friday the 13th. Thankfully, all of them are on Amazon so we landed up watching 1 and 2. Ill admit that I haven't watched them in decades. She really enjoyed them and revisiting the was definitely fun. We'll see how we get through before she gets tired of it.

She might not. I started showing my kids a lot of horror films when they were around 12. Still enjoying them together to this day

 

[MidnightMonkey]

I love David Cronenberg's movies. If you liked The Fly, check out his other movies. Most of them are movies you keep on thinking of for a while.

His latest movies haven't been up to par though imo.

Cronenberg is a God. well, maybe a demigod. I love all of his stuff, especially Videodrome and Eastern Promises.

Jim Carey from 1992-2001 and Jim Carey of 2002-2020 have a huge difference in quality and his overall performance.

I thought he was great in Dark Crimes. It's worth a watch just for his acting.

 

[jro]

21 Bridges - laughably awful throwback cop movie with a bizarrely strong cast. I mean, c'mon, Chadwick Boseman and JK Simmons both read the script for this and somehow each came to the conclusion that they wanted to be in it? Boseman, in particular, turns in a weird, mostly bad performance. Much of that may be due to the horrid script, but his performance consistently detracted from the movie, IMO. His character was ridiculous in general, but he didn't help at all.

One odd thing- "21 Bridges" must have been about eighth of ninth on the wishlist for the final title. The whole concept is that ALL THE BRIDGES ARE CLOSED and bad guys can't escape, which doesn't sound horrible, but then jack and shit happens regarding such.

 

[Naika]

Cronenberg is a God. well, maybe a demigod. I love all of his stuff, especially Videodrome and Eastern Promises.



I thought he was great in Dark Crimes. It's worth a watch just for his acting.

Love Videodrome. Need to watch it again.

 

[jro]

Proxy - one of the strangest movies I've seen in quite a while. Joe Swanberg is in it, and he's fine, but his part is bizarre, much like all the other, well, three parts. Little to nothing of what happens (or what turns out to have actually happened, better way of putting it maybe) seems remotely believable, but I never got bored and definitely don't dislike it.

That's about the extent of my endorsement, though, that I don't dislike it, and it's low-key severely messed up, even by my standards.

 

[2D_mastur]

The Lighthouse - Very homoerotic and try-hard artsy. I found myself laughing at most of it, hopefully this was the intention. I watched it because somebody recommended it to me, as I am a fan of Lovecraft. It wasn't bad, but I would never watch it again. Watching a movie in 4:3 and in B&W was cool, but mostly a hipster novelty. I give it a 6/10 at most.

 

[SouthtownKid]

Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee's netflix movie. I can't comment on it completely, because we had to stop in the middle and will pick it up again tonight, but it's good so far.

But the one thing that stands out a billion miles from anything else was Lee's choice to use the same actors both in the present day returning to Vietnam as old men, AND as their younger selves 45 years ago, serving in Vietnam. But unlike the Irishman or whatever, no CG whatsoever, not even any makeup. Just the same old ass man actors playing themselves as kids. Which is even more jarring because there's one character who only exists in the past era and he of course is played by a younger actor, who then interacts with these much older actors as if they're all the same age.

It's a bizarre choice. I don't know if the decision was artistic or budgetary. Like if Spike Lee intended to do something like The Irishman to digitally de-age the actors, but was denied the funds? Or if he always intended it to be the way it is, because of something to do with the idea of playing with memory? But I don't think I have ever in my life seen a movie expect me to accept four actors in their late 60s as being 20 years old, without some kind of visual trickery to help sell the illusion. Still, the characters are good enough that you end up going with it.

The one thing so far that I would classify as a negative is that the score is unmitigated garbage. The use of source music is fine as always in a Spike Lee movie (with the possible exception of Flight of the Valkyries, which I hope was intended to be ironic), but the background score itself does not serve the movie at all. It's meaningless, rambling tripe.

 

[evil wasabi]

The Lighthouse - Very homoerotic and try-hard artsy. I found myself laughing at most of it, hopefully this was the intention. I watched it because somebody recommended it to me, as I am a fan of Lovecraft. It wasn't bad, but I would never watch it again. Watching a movie in 4:3 and in B&W was cool, but mostly a hipster novelty. I give it a 6/10 at most.

It’s a hard movie to defend. Defending it would in fact be try hard.

 

[wyo]

The Lighthouse - Very homoerotic and try-hard artsy. I found myself laughing at most of it, hopefully this was the intention. I watched it because somebody recommended it to me, as I am a fan of Lovecraft. It wasn't bad, but I would never watch it again. Watching a movie in 4:3 and in B&W was cool, but mostly a hipster novelty. I give it a 6/10 at most.

Review is on point. I had a hard time understanding the dialogue in the theater but I'm not motivated to rewatch at home to decipher it, or the plot.

 

[oliverclaude]

It's a bizarre choice. I don't know if the decision was artistic or budgetary. Like if Spike Lee intended to do something like The Irishman to digitally de-age the actors, but was denied the funds? Or if he always intended it to be the way it is, because of something to do with the idea of playing with memory?

According to his own comments, it's both...

Spoiler:

"Here’s the thing," says Lee. "I knew there was no way in hell I was going to get the budget that Martin Scorsese got [to de-age] De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci in The Irishman, and it was a lot of money. And I dislike when films get different actors to play younger versions of the main characters. Also, makeup or prosthetics would’ve melted in the 100-degree heat."

But the discount solution provided an effective way to show that the Bloods are still trapped in their wartime memories even as they pass middle age. "It just works," says Lee. "These guys are going back in time, but this is how they see themselves. We did research screenings, and no one made an issue of it. Hollywood doesn’t give audiences enough credit for their intelligence."

[SUB](Source: Vulture)[/SUB]

 

[neo_mao]

I finally watched Joker. I didn’t like it. Too sad or depressing. I have no desire to watch that kind of stuff anymore. I watched European Vacation afterward and the topless aerobics barely cheered me up.

 

[SouthtownKid]

According to his own comments, it's both...

Spoiler:

Definitely a ballsy choice. But we watched the rest last night and really enjoyed it. Not Lee's best-- jungle firefight action sequences are way outside his comfort zone, and you can see he struggled with it -- but the character stuff is all fantastic as always and very much worth watching.

Holy shit, Jean Reno got old! I spent the first 5 minutes he was onscreen going back and forth as to whether it was really him.

 

[MetalSlugVet]

Watched “ford vs Ferrari” another stellar performance by Christian Bale. I feel the movie dragged a bit at times in the first act but certainly got better and sucked me into the story half way through. The cast was very believable in their roles and well suited to their parts.

There is a scene where the Bales characters wife is speeding and weaving in and out of traffic while bitching about him lying to her and the scene didn’t work at all and I felt it should of been cut for being utterly ludicrous. Other then that I highly recommend this film.

 

[oliverclaude]

Definitely a ballsy choice.

I feel you. It's like with Duchamp's Fountain, though, a choice able to fascinate as a singular occurrence, a novelty. Once used, it remains unrepeatable, though, carving out a miserable existence in parodies at most. Whoever tries to use it seriously again, will just quote Lee, at the same time destroying his own vision. Even Lee's vision suffers from it.

By the way, I was equally bewildered, when I watched That Obscure Object of Desire for the first time, where the leading female part, a beautiful young Spanish woman named Conchita, is played interchangeably(!) by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, which is not reasoned by the plot. An early wtf moment it was hard to get used to.

 

[MidnightMonkey]

Watched “ford vs Ferrari” another stellar performance by Christian Bale. I feel the movie dragged a bit at times in the first act but certainly got better and sucked me into the story half way through. The cast was very believable in their roles and well suited to their parts.

There is a scene where the Bales characters wife is speeding and weaving in and out of traffic while bitching about him lying to her and the scene didn’t work at all and I felt it should of been cut for being utterly ludicrous. Other then that I highly recommend this film.

Not gonna lie, I enjoyed Bale's performance so much in this it moved me to tears.

 

[smokehouse]

Watched “ford vs Ferrari” another stellar performance by Christian Bale. I feel the movie dragged a bit at times in the first act but certainly got better and sucked me into the story half way through. The cast was very believable in their roles and well suited to their parts.

There is a scene where the Bales characters wife is speeding and weaving in and out of traffic while bitching about him lying to her and the scene didn’t work at all and I felt it should of been cut for being utterly ludicrous. Other then that I highly recommend this film.

That's on my "to-do" for sure...


Meanwhile...my daughter and I finished Friday the 13th Part IV last night...chugging along.

 

[jro]

I finally watched Joker. I didn’t like it. Too sad or depressing. I have no desire to watch that kind of stuff anymore.

Joker reminds me of Crash (no not the one about erotic car accidents). Both got an undeserved wave of critical acclaim right when they came out, somehow got nominated for Best Picture (at least Joker didn't freaking win), and then fairly quickly, most people realized that each one is actually garbage.

Anyway, I watched The Vast of Night - doesn't quite live up to its hype IMO, but still an enjoyable sci-fi flick that understands its limitations and works well within them. Does a very good job of setting a tone that carries a somewhat light narrative, and the ending is pitch-perfect and adds quite a bit to all that happens leading up to it. Definitely still recommended if not quite genre-defining.

 

[neo_mao]

erotic car accidents

Now that’s my kind of movie

 

[100proof]

Now that’s my kind of movie

Cronenberg, man.

 

[jro]

Now that’s my kind of movie

Cronenberg, man.

Hahahahahahahaha

Watched it 20 years ago and still scarred.

 

[ggallegos1]

I rarely watch movies these days, but went ahead and saw The Warriors for the first time after beating the game a few months back. I love the cinematography and soundtrack, even if the story itself feels stilted and doesn't really take off too much into character development territory.

 

[smokehouse]

I rarely watch movies these days, but went ahead and saw The Warriors for the first time after beating the game a few months back. I love the cinematography and soundtrack, even if the story itself feels stilted and doesn't really take off too much into character development territory.

Still a highly enjoyable film to this day. Flawed, but good. It's one of the few HDDVD's that I own, I'll watch it on occasion.