VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[WyattSheepMask]

39 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Fantastic Beasts. Went to the Vue in Salford Quays for the first time. Are all Vue cinemas like this? Massive comfy chairs that recline and have a place to store your drink and a little side table. Fucking ace! Will definitely come here again!

No. My local Vue has the old style chairs with a couple of rows of ‘VIP Seats’ in each screen, which are wider leather ones but they don’t recline.

The Odeon however had a big refurb a few years back and is all recliner chairs with a little swingy table to put your snacks on

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, WyattSheepMask said:

No. My local Vue has the old style chairs with a couple of rows of ‘VIP Seats’ in each screen, which are wider leather ones but they don’t recline.

Cool, cheers for that. Think I’ll stick to this one for my yearly cinema visit. 

[Devon Malcolm]

55 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Fantastic Beasts. Went to the Vue in Salford Quays for the first time. Are all Vue cinemas like this?

They're doing the Printworks up currently to be like this.

[Keith Houchen]

18 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

They're doing the Printworks up currently to be like this.

I suppose you have to weigh up the cons of having to go to the Printworks. 

[Mr_Danger]

The seats in our Vue are so comfy I managed to have a power nap through the racket of shit film Tenet. 

[air_raid]

Finally watched Spencer. A film largely about Kirsten Stewart whispering. Emphasised by the score, which is both overpowering and relentless. I get that they were going for tension and claustrophobia but it completely distracted from when the actors were trying to do acting. The ending at least provided a much needed note of lightness/levity, maybe I’m just getting too jaded to enjoy a film where the mood is sombre or hostile from start to nearly finish, as happy as I was at the finale to be reminded I was watching events that happened in the 80s. Reading those final criticisms back, I’ve accidentally made it sound like I’d rather have just watched Guardians of the Galaxy again. And as I read that back, I realize it’s probably true.

[Mr_Danger]

Should have watched Spenser instead, at least that has some Alan Arkin and Winston Duke propping it up.

[Keith Houchen]

Or watched Spender. Jimmy Nail cracking cases despite an unhappy marriage. 

[Devon Malcolm]

Spencer was great, one of the very few acceptable pieces of media ever created about royals. Sean Harris plays a sympathetic character!

[air_raid]

10 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

Or watched Spender. Jimmy Nail cracking cases despite an unhappy marriage. 

Hello, I’m Richard, I’m 13 and a half stone, what about you, err…. Spender?

[Devon Malcolm]

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (cinema)

I mean, it's barely a movie, really. But Cage and Pascal are so enjoyable that it's worth seeing just for them. Amusing to see the bloke from Kerwhizz now doing Hollywood action movies.

Cast Away (Netflix)

Half an hour of boredom and the start and end bloats this out for so long that it felt like I'd been waitching it for four years. Zemeckis should be thankful the Back to the Future / Romancing the Stone goodwill will never run out.

Waking Life

Richard Linklater experimental animated existential bollocks, who fucking cares.

The Fugitive Kind (ok.ru)

Sidney Lumet klaxon! Typically bleak stuff from Sid, based on a Tennessee Williams story so very sweaty and horny and over-the-top. The ending's great, Brando is better. Pretty good.

Parole Violators (YouTube)

Rarely seen an action film that has as much going on in it as this. I mean, it's absolutely awful but also loads of fun because of how committed it is to violence. I'd watch it again three times.

The Children's Hour (ok.ru)

Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn get accused of being lesbians. Which, if true, would make them the hottest couple in history. This is William Wyler's remake of his own earlier film, These Three, which wasn't allowed to talk about girl on girl action. It's very sad but also excellent even if the main child actor is terrible and ruins parts of it. As a sidenote, Wyler is one of all time great directors and doesn't get credit for such. Roman Holiday, How to Steal a Million, The Big Country, Detective Story, The Best Years of Our Lives - he made all those and a bunch more excellent stuff.

The Jerk (ok.ru)

Hilarious, of course, but the best stuff here is anything M. Emmet Walsh is involved in.

Cool Hand Luke (ok.ru)

I've spent the last few days, whenever I take my hoodie off, saying out loud, "Just takin' it off here, boss!"

Man on the Moon (Netflix)

Unpopular opinion - Andy Kaufman wasn't funny. But this is a really good biopic and Carrey does the job perfectly. Lawler looks older than he does now.

[gmoney]

57 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Cast Away (Netflix)

Half an hour of boredom and the start and end bloats this out for so long that it felt like I'd been waitching it for four years. Zemeckis should be thankful the Back to the Future / Romancing the Stone goodwill will never run out.

 

Watched this today and you're not wrong, although, I enjoyed the bit on the island a lot more than I thought I would. Cowardly to not show him wanking and shitting, ultimately. 

I've also just watched Zemeckis' What Lies Beneath today, and despite the fact I finished it an hour ago, it still somehow has 40 minutes to go. 

Edited May 6, 2022 by gmoney

[Mr_Danger]

A sure sign of having kids when finding out that the Kerwhizz fella does films now sells you on the latest Nic Cage film.

[BomberPat]

I watched Doctor Sleep last night.

I still don't really know what I made of it. I haven't read the book, which from what I gather is far more explicitly about alcoholism, coming to terms with past trauma (not "pasta trauma", as I just typed), and so on. Elements of that are obviously present in the movie, but they never feel like they're at the heart of it at all - Ewan McGregor isn't bad as grown-up Danny Torrance, though I'm not convinced he ever felt like he was actually a grown-up version of the kid from The Shining, just a different character with the same name.

The main thing that made this interesting is that it attempts to thread the needle of being an adaptation of a book that's a sequel to Stephen King's Shining, while also acting as a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's Shining. Problem is that, in order to do that, they need to commit a cardinal sin of cinema - never remind the audience of a better film that they could be watching. To that end, there's good and there's bad - I got chills at the opening credits using Wendy Carlos' main theme from The Shining, loved the amount of callbacks to the long shots of winding forest roads, and all but shot-for-shot remakes of the drive up to the Overlook Hotel. There's other nice touches too - when Danny is offered a job at the hospice, the doctor's office he's in is very clearly modeled on the manager's office at the Overlook. 

It's where that subtlety disappears that it all gets a bit harder to like; when it's all axes, typewriters and hedge mazes, you could very generously make the argument that it's about reliving past trauma or the cycle of abuse, and especially when a (bad) portrayal of Jack Torrance shows up. But mostly, it feels like clumsy attempts to make the movie better by association with a much, much better film.

The more it went on, the more I realised the strength of The Shining was in how much Kubrick stripped away all of the most "Stephen King" elements of Stephen King's book. By making the ghosts of the Overlook literal, quantifiable entities, and adding in a greater array of magical nonsense, pseudo-immortal villains, and really bad depictions of psychic conflict, while still trying to act as a sequel to Kubrick's film, where it's kept ambiguous to what extent any of that stuff is real, it just serves to undermine not only The Shining, but the central conceit of Doctor Sleep being, on some level, about alcoholism and familial trauma. The strength of The Shining (which, if you hadn't guessed, is one of my favourite films) is in its ambiguity, and this is a film tasked with removing all of that in support of a much weaker narrative.

In spite of all of that, I think I still sort of enjoyed it as a very Stephen King romp, albeit a far too long one

[Devon Malcolm]

Everything Everywhere All at Once (cinema)

The hype is accurate. More or less nothing like anything I've seen before but unlike these guys' first film (Swiss Army Man), I mean that as a compliment. I went in totally blind and knew very little about it and I'm sure that contributed a lot to why I loved it so much. The film of the year so far.

Soul

I don't think Pete Docter got this. Surprising that he leans quite heavily on elements from Inside Out rather than concentrating on his characters in the real world - but maybe a black director would have done that. Nice enough but a missed opportunity.

Private Wars (DailyMotion)

Everyone harps on about how great Cannon were for low budget actioners, but PM Entertainment were the real heroes. Here, Steve Railsback plays the slobbiest looking action hero of all time, battering street gangs who want to take over a neighbourhood. An absolute blast and way funnier than I expected.

Deep Blue Sea

Confirmed (once again) as one of the five good shark films ever made.

Deathcheaters 

Obscure Australian 70s action-comedy from Ozploitation legend Brian Trenchard-Smith. Just an excuse for a lot of (very good stunts) and there's practically no plot, but I didn't care and neither will anyone else.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Not as sweaty or hysterical as A Streetcar Named Desire but still enjoyably miserable and full of scintillating dialogue. Tennessee Williams could write an insult.

The Long Riders

Not sure why I'd never seen this considering how much I love Walter Hill's films and I feel even sillier now I've seen it. Gritty and nasty western with some of the best casting I've seen.

Singles

Cameron Crowe plays some of his records and makes a pretty crap film around them. As usual.