Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted March 13, 2022 Moderators Share Posted March 13, 2022 Got around to watching Don't Look Up today. I understand the reception to it was mixed but I thought it was good. It's very American - by which I mean broad and unsubtle, but felt accurate enough in its satire that it avoided being too Hollywood smug for me to enjoy. Mark Rylance was great in it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Devon Malcolm Posted March 13, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 13, 2022 34 minutes ago, jazzygeofferz said: Shoot Em Up was out around this time wasn't it? A similarly ridiculous, but fun, movie. Yeah, it's fantastic. No idea why it seems to have been forgotten. Even Clive Owen can't ruin it.  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Jazzy G Posted March 13, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 13, 2022 (edited) I bought Shoot Em Up on DVD. Mad film. I laughed my arse off during the sex scene. EDIT: Tonight's offering is Nobody. I enjoyed the fight on the bus, and how Bob Odenkirk takes a beating as well through the movie, as opposed to the usual action fare of the protagonist coming through mostly unscathed apart from a few scratches. Edited March 14, 2022 by jazzygeofferz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted March 18, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 18, 2022 so, during the first lockdown a bunch of my girlfriend's mates started a group chat thing where, every Thursday, they all nominate a film on Netflix or Prime, someone rolls a dice, and that decides which film they'll all watch together. They've kept it up intermittently, and I've since moved in with my girlfriend, so I've been taking part in from time to time. There's a generally unwritten rule that it should be either a weird or a "so bad it's good" movie, and that it shouldn't be a film that anyone in the group has seen in the last few years, ideally ever. Last night it ended up being the turn of The Wicker Man. The Nicolas Cage one. I haven't seen it in at least ten years, and it's somehow even worse than I remembered. Now, I love the original Wicker Man. It's a foundational text for me, an absolute masterpiece. Literally everything that makes the original movie work is absent from the remake. There's a point, in the remake, where Sister Summersisle says to Cage's character, "you have come of your own free will to keep your own appointment with the wicker man". That line makes sense in the original movie; there's a significance to the issue of free will, both in terms of the sacrifice needing to be willing, and more abstractly around questions of free will in relation to Ewar Woowar's character's devout Christianity. In the remake it's meaningless. In the original, Woodward is the chosen sacrifice because he came of his free will, has the power of a King, and is a virgin. In the remake, none of that is true of Cage's character, nor would it matter if it was, because all we're told is that he was "the perfect choice", and that the people of the island have been manipulating things for years to get him there. Absolutely no explanation why him over anyone else, or exactly how that manipulation operated - they somehow managed to infiltrate the police force in a different state, and to somehow stage a car accident that should have killed a woman and child but somehow didn't, while conveniently only knocking Cage back and getting him signed off work with PTSD. How do they manage that? Through what mechanism? Not only that, but everyone on the island is immediately an obvious wrong'un. They're all evasive, suspicious and obstructive, so there's never the slightest doubt over whether they're fucking him over or not, because that's evident from the beginning. When you get to the end and the revelation that Cage is the sacrifice, but with no satisfactory explanation as to why, the entire film is rendered even more pointless than you already thought, because why bother leading him on weird wild goose chases with burned dolls and fake graves and stolen photographs when literally all they needed to do was break his legs and drag him into a wicker man? Similarly, the whole Paganism vs. Christianity thing is almost the entire undercurrent of the original film (I say "almost", because a key point I always make about the original is that it's not actually about a survival of pre-Christian religion - Lord Summerisle has manufactured a facsimile of the "old ways" to keep people in line and keep them from questioning his leadership amid failed harvests, it's about power and corruption as much as it's about religion), but is barely window dressing in this one. Sister Summersisle gives a big old exposition dump of how her "Celtic" ancestors came to the island because they were ostracised for "embracing femininity", but unfortunately "settled in Salem" before being forced further westward and ending up on this island in 1850. The whole "surviving pre-Christian religion" trope was never going to make any sense with white people in North America, but what makes it worse is that one of the key locations for the film is the ruins of a church and graveyard, with the implication being that it was left to fall into disrepair and disuse because the people had abandoned Christianity and no longer had use for it. But that doesn't match the movie's own stated backstory, nor any possible timeline they're working within. Not only is there no sense of a coherent culture on the island, there's no sense of the island at all. There are scenes where Cage runs down to the beach, or stumbles across someone's cottage, that give absolutely no indication where these things are in relation to each other, what the geography of the island is, how large it is, or anything. It's just ambling from location to location, it never feels real in the sense that the original always does. There's not one shred of believability to any of it. That's particularly true once it gets into the third act, where it abandons any sense of presenting us with a distinct society, in favour of trying to be The Shining and just showing random grab bags of creepy imagery every time Nicolas Cage opens a door - here's a man with physical deformities, here's a woman covered in bees, here's some people in robes, here's creepy twins. On top of all that, it's a deeply unpleasant film. The first time I watched it, I remembered laughing at the absurdity of an extended sequence of Nicolas Cage just running around indiscriminately beating up women, but actually, the film is just sodden with misogyny - every woman is a liar, a betrayer and a seductress, and in the absence of any believable religious or cultural logic behind the people of Summersisle it just seems like the message is "women in charge is a bad idea". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted March 18, 2022 Moderators Share Posted March 18, 2022 I've never seen it and I'm sure I never will, but it did give me one of my all-time favourite classic YouTube clips   Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Devon Malcolm Posted March 18, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 18, 2022 Red Rocket (cinema) Enjoyed this a lot and Sean Baker is definitely an outstanding filmmaker but he's also pretty much a one trick pony who needs to start doing something different. Simon Rex is as great as you''ve heard but Sophie the dog is better. Windfall (Netflix) Netflix's latest Original that they haven't bothered advertising, even more criminal when it's got Jesse Plemons in it. Kinda developing a thing for these mostly one location thrillers shot during lockdowns like Copshop and Kimi and now this. About time Jason Segel reappeared too. Still can't believe Lily Collins is the spawn of Phil. Master (Prime) New Amazon original, a social horror film set at an Ivy League university. Really well acted with an oppressive atmosphere but doesn't need to really be a horror film. Cracking ending, overall pretty decent. Blacklight Liam Neeson needs to pack in the actioners, I think. This isn't terrible but he's definitely overdone them by now and he needs to retire from the genre and let someone else corner the geriaction market. Fever Pitch (ok.ru) The romcom part of this is really weird - Ruth Gemmell and Colin Firth just hate each other the whole way through. Still pretty good though and the football stuff was well done for a change. Mark Strong was always bald, huh. Just Like Heaven (ok.ru) Ruffalo and Wetherspoon make for a cute couple and there are a few decent laughs here and there. Fine background stuff, nothing more. Outland (ok.ru) Still far and away one of the best sci-fi films of the 80s. Magic stuff from Peter Hyams, who was almost always excellent. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members bAzTNM#1 Posted March 19, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 19, 2022 (edited) On 3/5/2022 at 10:34 PM, Devon Malcolm said: The Killing Fields (Prime) Still an extremely powerful film about the Cambodian genocide. Doesn't go as hard at the Americans as I'd personally have liked it to, but they don't get off too lightly for their part played. Mike Oldfield did the musical score for that and it's absolute shite. I remember the Cambodian guy in it winning an Oscar, then getting murdered a few years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haing_S._Ngor Edited March 19, 2022 by bAzTNM#1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members waters44 Posted March 19, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 19, 2022 Off topic but there’s a great book called The Killing Fields of Cambodia: Surviving a Living Hell by Sokphal Din. He works on the tills in a nearby Sainsbury’s and he’s a really lovely bloke. Also I’m pretty sure proceeds from the book goes to charity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidB6937 Posted March 20, 2022 Share Posted March 20, 2022 Already seen it but Boiling Point will be on Netflix from Wednesday. Definitely worth it if you haven't yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wordsfromlee Posted March 20, 2022 Share Posted March 20, 2022 Fresh It really wants to be a Jordan Peele film, but isn't. It's decent and worth a watch, but nothing special. It reminded me a bit of that movie with Allison Williams, The Perfection, but not completely shite. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Devon Malcolm Posted March 20, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 20, 2022 Nah, I thought The Perfection was superb. The whole scene on the bus alone made it Netflix's best horror film yet. Fresh was alright. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members chokeout Posted March 20, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 20, 2022 2 hours ago, wordsfromlee said: Fresh It really wants to be a Jordan Peele film, but isn't. It's decent and worth a watch, but nothing special. It reminded me a bit of that movie with Allison Williams, The Perfection, but not completely shite. Just finished it. It really couldn’t decide on a tone. Wanted to play the Peele social commentary angle but about modern dating, wanted to be a comedy, wanted to be a horror and didn’t really achieve any of them.   Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr_Danger Posted March 20, 2022 Share Posted March 20, 2022 Is The Perfection the one where she does a shit? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members gmoney Posted March 20, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 20, 2022 Paula Radcliffe biopic? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted March 20, 2022 Share Posted March 20, 2022 Rewatched Office Space. It was brilliant. Watched The Adam Project. It was not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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