VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[Devon Malcolm]

As soon as Del Toro started making films in English he became very boring. Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and especially Pan's Labyrinth are all great. The rest? Eh. He's become far too obsessed with style over any semblance of substance.

[Keith Houchen]

I’ll actually be going to the cinema to see Fantastic Beasts. My partner is a huge Wizarding World fan (it’s the nicest fandom) so once half term is over, we will be going on the meerkat days. Last few times I’ve gone cinema was for shit marvel nonsense so I’m sure this’ll be better. It’s got Sexy Mads for a start. 

[Merzbow]

I'll be taking the cinema plunge for the first time since Titane this week myself, The Northman looks amazing and I'll be sure to listen to copious amounts of Scandi Black Metal on the way there.

[Hannibal Scorch]

2 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

I’ll actually be going to the cinema to see Fantastic Beasts. My partner is a huge Wizarding World fan (it’s the nicest fandom) so once half term is over, we will be going on the meerkat days. Last few times I’ve gone cinema was for shit marvel nonsense so I’m sure this’ll be better. It’s got Sexy Mads for a start. 

I hope she enjoys it. It seems very split. My wife hated it, and she’s the big Harry Potter fan in the house, but she thinks the series has been a disappointment once it was clear this was just Dumbledore the early years and not about Newt finding creatures. 

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

I hope she enjoys it. It seems very split. My wife hated it, and she’s the big Harry Potter fan in the house, but she thinks the series has been a disappointment once it was clear this was just Dumbledore the early years and not about Newt finding creatures. 

I think if it’s got Nifflers, she will be happy! Loads of the little blighters in the flat!

[The Gaffer]

I still have a very strong nostalgia for Potter but with both this series and the upcoming Hogwarts Legacy game I find it just has zero extension to anything outside that core series. Just not fucked at all about pre war wizards. It's a 90s/00s thing that's great because of watching the likes of Rickman, Fiennes and Jason Isaacs ham around the place because they hit the jackpot doing something their nieces/nephews convinced them to sign on to. And the kids too, obviously. Who all matured so well into those roles and turned out to be good people. 

Not interested in anything without them. 

Edited April 12, 2022 by Gay as FOOK

[Factotum]

To be honest only one Harry Potter film was really any good, and that was AZKABAN. Superb film that. The rest are at best OK if you ignore the terrible acting from the main 3 (Emma Watson being the worst offender) The supporting cast really do the heavy lifting and are excellent.

I didn't mind this film. Jude Law's outfits are worth the admission alone.

[HarmonicGenerator]

20 minutes ago, Factotum said:

To be honest only one Harry Potter film was really any good, and that was AZKABAN. Superb film that. The rest are at best OK if you ignore the terrible acting from the main 3 (Emma Watson being the worst offender) The supporting cast really do the heavy lifting and are excellent.

I didn't mind this film. Jude Law's outfits are worth the admission alone.

My wife refers to the series as 'Fantastic Coats and Where to Find Them'. The outfits are spectacular. Every character seemed to have the nicest coat I've ever seen. Don't know why witches and wizards stopped wearing good suits and incredible coats and started wearing robes and cloaks. 

For Keith's benefit (Niffler related)

Spoiler

Three individual Nifflers in the film, the main one gets a good hero moment. He's still great.

 

[The Gaffer]

51 minutes ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

My wife refers to the series as 'Fantastic Coats and Where to Find Them'. The outfits are spectacular. Every character seemed to have the nicest coat I've ever seen. Don't know why witches and wizards stopped wearing good suits and incredible coats and started wearing robes and cloaks. 

For Keith's benefit (Niffler related)

  Reveal hidden contents

Three individual Nifflers in the film, the main one gets a good hero moment. He's still great.

 

Mine referred to the original as 'Fantastic Breads & How to Bake them' on account of the amount of bakery scenes and whatnot. 

If we're doing a mini divergence on Potter films, I do rate the Alfonso Cuarón Azkaban and can see how it might objectively be the tightest - same as the book really - but I love the dark stride it hit under David Heyman from Order onward. 

[Devon Malcolm]

VHS and Betamax (and TERFs) You Have Recently Rented (and Enabled)

[SuperBacon]

Boiling Point

I'll be honest, I'm not a massive Graham fan, but he is absolutely superb in this. So tense I had to go for a cigarette halfway through. 

Speed

I reckon Reeves and Bullock in this might be the fittest screen couple ever. For me Clive, still the best action movie of the 90s.

Apollo 10 and ½

Lovely stuff. Could've spent the whole film in the 'childhood/60s round up' part. I've always loved Linklater. 

Back To The Future

Still the best film of all time.

Metal Lords

Really loved this, it's really, really sweet. Even funnier if you ever joined a band in school/college and thought this would lead you into stardom. DoSe (yes that capital S is deliberate) broke up before we ever had a gig, but I'm sure we would've headlined Download if we had carried on. Isis Hainsworth is one to watch.

The Breakfast Club

I've said it before, but Estevez smoking weed and it giving him to energy to cartwheel around the classroom will never not be funny. Must've been top doobage. 

American Pie*

Still very funny. Incredibly of it's time though and nostalgia hits hard.

American Pie 2*

Help me.

American Wedding*

OH GOD HELP ME. Dreadful, but SWS is on top form and carries the whole film. Also, January Jones is the number one reason to watch it.

American Reunion*

A return to form of sorts. I quite liked how it ended, and it was quite sweet.

In fact, all of the films are quite sweet, the relationship between Jim and his Dad being the best part of them. Genuinely touching moments.

Could've done without seeing Eugene Levy get a blow job though.

*No, everything is not OK.

[Thunderplex]

The Sparks Brothers.  Normally if I watched a two and a half hour documentary about a subject and still really know fuck all about the main subject matter I’d be annoyed, but this was really engaging, the brothers come across as genuinely good people and geniuses.  Cheered me up, well worth watching.

[bAzTNM#1]

"American Pie" is stuck in 1999. Incredibly dated now. Absolutely hilarious film though.

Edited April 14, 2022 by bAzTNM#1

[Frankie Crisp]

Don't Breathe 2

Kevin Nash reprises his role and mental rapey blind man who somehow once again seems able to batter people with weapons when they get into his house. As absurd as the first was one, I enjoyed it at the time because it was a fun but with a somewhat more tense set-up, where every movement and sound mattered. This one was just outright nonsense, in concept, plot and execution.

It's one of those films where nearly everyone's a baddie, but some are good baddies and some are bad baddies. The problem with this is that the good baddie was an actual rapist in the first film, so it's not exactly easy to get behind him. And the one goodie is annoying as hell. 

As it goes on it gets more and more ridiculous, even when you accept the whole 'mate, he's BLIND' aspect of things. Goes on too long, the scenes that are meant to be gory or gruesome are completely hilarious and the last ten or fifteen minutes take it completely off a cliff.

The head baddie does seem to be channeling his inner Jon Moxley, though, so there was that.

 

 

[Devon Malcolm]

The Lost City (cinema)

Really thought this was going to be a lot more enjoyable than it was but I was pretty bored. It doesn't do anything terrible wrong and the cast are really good but just not a great deal happens, really. Just watch Romancing the Stone.

A Time to Kill (Netflix)

Once you've seen one John Grisham adaptation, you've seen them all. They're usually passable but this one was made by Joel Schumacher, who was a very bad director, and therefore it's absolutely awful. Hysterically entertaining at times but terrible. If you want a good sweaty Ashley Judd film (I do), watch The Passion of Darkly Noon.

Louder Than Bombs

The Worst Person in the World's Joachim Trier did an English language film that I didn't know about it and it's mostly as good as the rest of his stuff. Even Jesse Eisenberg was bearable so Trier's clearly special.

Rise / Dawn / War for the Planet of the Apes

How quickly everyone forgot this is one of the best trilogies that Hollywood has ever produced and that Caesar is one of the best characters in American cinema for decades. All these films are great but the third one is especially brilliant, just a gorgeous action-adventure that turns into a prison camp film of high quality in its second half. Ridiculous they're still farting around over whether they'll make another one.

Domino

A rare miss for Tony Scott. Not sure what he was going for here, just a lot of style and not much substance. But I'll let him off, we all love our Tony after all.

Patton

More a stitching together of George C. Scott speeches than a fully formed film but I'll happily watch three hours of Scott shouting at people and walking his dog. What an actor he was.

Congo

STOP EATING MY SESAME CAKE