VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[SaitoRyo]

1 minute ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Lisa Frankenstein

Finally, a Diablo Cody-written film that didn't make me unreasonably angry. This was great, very funny and smart and stupid in all the right measures. The production design is fantastic and Kathryn Newton is always excellent. Directed by Robin Williams' daughter!

I reckon I'll check this out before long. Got really lukewarm reviews but I thought it at least looked like it could be a lot of fun. 

[Merzbow]

It's a solid three out of five Bret Harts, it's actually got a lot of heart, looks and sounds superb and Cole Sprouse is surprisingly great without saying a word. It's got "cult classic" written all over it, I can see it having a good lengthy fanbase even though as you said it didn't review all that well.

I can see Cole getting some bigger roles now that Riverdale is out of the way, he was the one kid of the show that you could tell had some deeper acting ability about him if even the content he was given was daft as shite.

Edited December 21, 2024 by Merzbow

[Hannibal Scorch]

Mufasa: The Lion King - Stupid photorealistic talking and singing animals. 1 of only 2 films I actually fell asleep watching this year, better then the 2019 one, Andy Nyman’s son is fucking awful as Zazu, worst voice performance I’ve heard, possibly ever.

Sonic 3 - Jim Carrey has a ball, and I had a much more fun time than I’d expected. Probably best of the 3. 

[Carbomb]

4 hours ago, Merzbow said:

I can see Cole getting some bigger roles now that Riverdale is out of the way, he was the one kid of the show that you could tell had some deeper acting ability about him if even the content he was given was daft as shite.

Blew me away to find out he (and his twin bro) were Ross' son Ben in Friends.

Also, Lili Reinhart who plays Betty in Riverdale is one of the most beautiful generic blondes I've ever seen.

[Just Some Guy]

On 12/17/2024 at 11:37 PM, Hannibal Scorch said:

I dare you to watch Carry On Columbus and say that.

I'm not going to attempt to order them all but compared to England & Emmanuel, Columbus feels like Blazing Saddles.

[SaitoRyo]

Delusion

Noirish, desert-set crime thriller from 1991.

A computer company exec embezzles a bunch of money and heads to Reno to start up anew when he picks up a couple who have crashed their car and lives to regret his decision. Starts off a bit annoying (and you'll be a better man than me if you can ignore how much Kyle Secor looks like Mac from the early seasons of It's Always Sunny), but gets pretty good about half an hour in and hooks you until the end.

Jennifer Rubin, who most will probably know as the 'punky' one from Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (and is absolutely gorgeous here), is great in this and the film ends up being as much about her as it does the two doomed men.

[LaGoosh]

La Chimera - an Italian film that came out last year but looks and feels like it came out in the 70s in the best way possible. A strange, beautiful little film about a gang of tomb/grave robbers that utterly charmed me. Josh O'Connor is in it and is tremendous. 

[Scratch]

Me and Mrs Scratch watched Carry On this evening, keen to break the regular annual Christmas movie watchathon. We were so bored and couldn’t wait for it to end.

The best bit was when Taron Egerton broke into a weak jog and looked just like the T1000.

We both much preferred the Tetris Movie.

[BigJag]

We went to visit some friends in London over the weekend. Once we'd been to the Paddington Experience and had a second afternoon tea of the weekend. We ended up back at theirs and watched Last Christmas on Netflix. It stars Emilia Clarke and Michelle Yeoh co-stars. The film is set in London during the Christmas period and as we'd just experienced a good portion of the City. It was fun spotting the sights. The film is fun and the twist can be seen a mile off. Emilia Clarke plays a Covent garden Christmas shop elf. 

The Paddington Experience is very well done and Afternoon Teas are extortionate!

[HarmonicGenerator]

I don't want to clog up the Top 10s 2024 thread with my annual big film post, but I will clog up this one. It's 332 pages, it can take it.

This year I managed to see 49 new release films, slightly more than my average but obviously not a comprehensive list. There's loads of stuff I haven't seen, so when I'm figuring out my favourites, least favourites and middles of the year, I'm only going off what I've seen. 

TLDR summary

Spoiler

The Holdovers was the first film I saw this year and I didn't see anything I liked more all year. That's my number 1. Bottom of the list is obviously Argylle because it was dreadful.

Long summary, also in a spoiler box so it's not annoying

Spoiler

Let's maybe start with Awards Contenders and see where we end up.

The first film I saw this year was The Holdovers. I loved that film very much. It felt like watching a great novel, the characters just felt like real, complete people and I cared what happened to all of them. I can't see any other film I saw this year ranking higher than this - I don't think I watched anything better.

The Zone Of Interest was excellent. We saw this on a Saturday night and it was slightly weird the number of couples coming in with their fizzy drinks and popcorn and treating it as a date night. I don't know if they knew what they were about to watch but a lot of that popcorn ended up not being eaten. The film has stayed with me all year, the sound design especially, and I will never watch it again.

I really liked American Fiction too. The story thread about the book worked a lot more for me than the family thread, which is why it won't end up as high as the two above. Definitely higher than Poor Things, though. I can appreciate the design and skill and everything, but absolutely nothing in that film was for me. On some level I can recognise it's Good but I just didn't like any of it. (It's a bit like Dune Part Two where I knew I was watching something objectively impressive, but it left me completely cold, I didn't care about anything that was happening.)

Colman Domingo got an Oscar nomination for Rustin didn't he? Classic case of main actor being better than the film he's in, but it's still definitely worth a watch. (Similar to Kate Winslet in Lee, but that also has an excellent Andy Samberg supporting performance, and benefitted from the fact we saw it when we had a spare afternoon in London and we went to the really comfy but not that expensive cinema inside Selfridges.)

Early ranking

1. The Holdovers

2. The Zone of Interest

3. American Fiction

4. Dune Part Two

5. Rustin

6. Lee

7. Poor Things

 

Sequels and Prequels next.

Like with Lee, seeing A Quiet Place Day One while we were on holiday probably helped my enjoyment of it, because there is just something more fun about going to the cinema somewhere different. I genuinely think it's a great movie, and I'd put it on par with the first one. Lupita Nyong'o is fantastic in it, with a believable motivation (the world's ending - get pizza - I get it) and a truly brilliant cat. There's some properly scary bits, the city setting works really well, and it's got an ending that's a perfect happy ending and a full-on gutpunch at the same time. Catch it if you missed it over the summer.

Inside Out 2 wasn't on the level of the first one for most of its runtime, but it's going to end up very high on my list because of the panic attack sequence towards the end, which hit me right in the Pixars. I've never quite been able to explain to anyone what it's like in my head when anxiety takes over, and I don't think my wife's been able to fully understand what's going on when it happens because it's not something she's experienced. But this movie somehow reached into my head and perfectly visualised how it feels. When Anxiety starts speeding up and speeding up around the console and the other emotions can't even get close and she can't stop and it cuts to Riley just gripping onto something trying to cling on and Anxiety's going faster and faster and ... I was a wreck. The film was worth making just for that sequence.

Sticking with animated stuff, how lovely was it to have Vengeance Most Fowl to watch over Christmas? A funny, wonderfully animated hour and a quarter, Aardman's best for some time. (And if we're going nice, sentimental heartwarming animated movies that I saw around Christmas, That Christmas is very much all those things, and is Richard Curtis' best film set in December.)

Couple of films that I kind of group together, Gladiator II and Furiosa. Both had elements I really, really liked - Denzel hamming it up in the former, the History Man in the latter - and both were films I tried harder to like more than I did. Ultimately neither one could quite match the film they were sequelising - that's not normally a problem but when you're talking Gladiator and Fury Road, it's easy to be disappointed by something that's good but just not on the same level.

Gladiator II was probably the best legacy sequel I saw this year (Furiosa's a prequel I know).Twisters was fine, and definitely the better Glen Powell movie from 2024 for me (I didn't get on with Hit Man despite really wanting to like it. Glen Powell charm wasn't enough to paper over the fact he manipulated and lied to Adria Arjona for most of the movie and if he's sleeping with her under that pretence, without her knowledge of the truth, that's really kind of unpleasant? Right?). Alien Romulus started off well, then a Thing happened and I thought "hmm, no", then a second Thing happened and I thought "definitely not" and then the third Thing happened and I thought "absolutely not" and those three things were the impression I left the cinema with.

I will stick up for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I think it's better than Afterlife because it's less openly reverential in its fan service. I think it works balancing the new characters and the older ones. I think it being back in New York helped it a lot. It's not very good but it's much better than it might have been.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was one I really enjoyed. Loved the idea of so long having passed since Caesar's time that nobody can quite remember what happened back then, they've got different stories and histories and how do you keep these things alive? Similar to the History Man in Furiosa . And while we're with apes, Godzilla x Kong had a bit where Kong used a small ape as a weapon to twat some bigger apes, and Godzilla did a suplex on the Pyramids, and that's all the really good bits in that whole film. That's more than I can remember from Rebel Moon Part Two but I'm sure I still liked that more than Poor Things.

Here's another ranking

1. The Holdovers

2. A Quiet Place Day One

3. Inside Out 2

4. The Zone of Interest

5. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

6. American Fiction

7. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

8. Gladiator II

9. Furiosa

10. That Christmas

11. Dune Part Two

12. Twisters

13. Rustin

14. Lee

15. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

16. Alien Romulus

17. Godzilla x Kong

18. Hit Man

19. Rebel Moon Part Two

20. Poor Things

 

Let's get the comicbook movies out of the way.

Joker: Folie a Deux was grim, miserable and pointless. I'd still watch it again over Poor Things but that's not saying much. Madame Web is better. I will not die on that hill but I will stand on the hill and proclaim it. Not loudly, but louder than a whisper.

I didn't hate Deadpool & Wolverine and I fully expected to. That's probably the best thing I can say about it - I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it and I really thought I would.

I think that might be it for superheroes this year. I'll do a few documentaries.

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is obviously going to end up ranking high on my list. I'm completely biased. But this movie made me emotional five or six times watching it. Every time they showed Clarence. The explanation of the set list. Stevie becoming Musical Director. Backstreets. And so on.

Similarly, Music By John Williams was a film I was always predisposed to love. It didn't really tell me anything I didn't know, but it cemented that Williams is the greatest film composer of all time, and it has several lovely moments of Williams and Spielberg just hanging out as "Johnny and Stevie". (Jim Henson: Idea Man did something not far off - showing you very effectively why Henson was great at what he did, but not really offering much you couldn't easily find out somewhere else).

Beatles 64 was okay, and it's always a treat to see footage of the lads, but otherwise it never really grabbed me. 

Not worth doing another list-in-progress already, so I'll throw in films that were just on streaming.

Every movie I'll mention in this post is better than Argylle. Argylle is terrible. It is a waste of however many hours it takes to sit through it. It's far worse than Poor Things. It's considerably worse than Drive Away Dolls which is the only other film this year I'd put below Poor Things. (I did not like Drive Away Dolls. Not at all. But it's better than Argylle.)

You'd expect a new Guy Ritchie film to stand a good chance of being in this kind of company, but I had so much fun with The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare. I really hope he does another one. It's silly and it's over the top and it's so very historically inaccurate but it's Henry Cavill and Alan Ritchson and a bunch of a guys blowing up Nazis and what's not to like there?

Jackpot! was another Prime film. It's fine. Big Match John is good value as he normally is. Two okay Netflix films were Scoop and Damsel , but Damsel should have been better than it was. Could have had lots of dragon content, instead mainly had Millie Bobby Brown doing a scream and not really looking like she wanted to be there. Carry-On is also fine, but is a higher level of fine because I was into it while I was watching. I didn't know what would happen next, I wanted to find out. Tick, tick.

Apple did a lot better having Blitz than with Argylle. Good performances, strong episodic story, good cat.

Penultimate ranking

1. The Holdovers

2. A Quiet Place Day One

3. Inside Out 2

4. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

5. Music By John Williams

6. The Zone of Interest

7. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

8. American Fiction

9. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

10. Gladiator II

11. Furiosa

12. Jim Henson: Idea Man

13. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

14. That Christmas

15. Carry-On

16. Blitz

17. Deadpool & Wolverine

18. Dune Part Two

19. Twisters

20. Rustin

21. Lee

22. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

23. Beatles '64

24. Alien Romulus

25. Godzilla x Kong

26. Scoop

27. Jackpot!

28. Hit Man

29. Damsel

30. Madame Web

31. Joker: Folie a Deux

32. Rebel Moon Part Two

33. Poor Things

34. Drive Away Dolls

35. Argylle

 

Still another 14 to go. Here's the rest.

The really great - The Iron Claw worked really well for me, a great movie about wrestling that also worked for a non-fan. My wife had to take herself away and cry for a bit afterwards, so the emotional resonance of the Von Erich tragedies definitely came across.

My Old Ass has a terrible title but if you get past that there's a really sweet coming-of-age time-travel-ish story in there that's absolutely worth your time. I recommended this to quite a few people.

Conclave is a cracking thriller, really well shot with great performances across the board. If it's still at a cinema near you, go and see it, you will not be disappointed.

Civil War is one I've been up and down with a bit - sometimes I think it's amazing, sometimes I think it's not so much. At the moment I'm closer to the first one - it came out in April(?) and I can still remember so much of it vividly, so it's definitely got something to it.

Young Woman and the Sea is kind of just your standard Disney underdog sports story and there's no reason for it to be as good as it is. But I really got invested in this story. If it hits all the predictable beats of a story like this, you know what, fine, sometimes that's just what you need. It's pretty great. And that jellyfish bit...

 

The good - The Bikeriders felt like a Bruce Springsteen song come to life - something from the era of 'Racing in the Street' or 'The River'. Bonus points for Austin Butler finally sounding like he might have got rid of the Elvis voice. I like this one more each time I think about it. 

I watched that one on a plane, maybe not the ideal setting but I'm glad I did. Put on Monkey Man on the same flight, and the plane setting maybe did not do justice to it. The story didn't really engage me, and maybe a flight isn't the place for ultraviolent action. I might like it more if I saw it again.

The Fall Guy had a lot going for it. Great action, super chemistry with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. The ending lets it down but I had fun.

 

The okay - Firebrand goes really well for most of its runtime (Jude Law is a great Henry VIII), until about fifteen minutes before the end where you start desperately wanting to pop on Wikipedia. "Hang on, did that happen?!" quickly becomes "no no, that did NOT happen" and I'm not usually a stickler for accuracy, but when you pay so much attention to it for 90% of the film and then take a wild swing right at the end, it really jars.

Staying with historical, the Edinburgh Film Festival was back this year and we caught a couple of premieres including Timestalker. The premise of this one worked, but the execution didn't quite for me - it was just slightly too weird and low-budget-British-indie for me. Alice Lowe and some of the producers did speeches before the screening, and one of them said "you'd never guess we managed to film all of this in Wales" and I wish he hadn't said that because maybe you wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't said it but with that implanted in the mind it was really obvious they didn't have budget for half their locations - it's a shame. 

(We also saw The Radleys at the festival - it's Damian Lewis and Kelly Macdonald as suburban vampires and it's decent. I think it's on Sky now?)

Another British effort that didn't fully gel for me was Wicked Little Letters. Lots of good performances in this, but one of the central ones - Jessie Buckley's - was probably my biggest issue. She tends to play characters with an edge, but usually gives them more edge than they necessarily need, especially when they're meant to be a lead and on some level sympathetic.

From one film with Wicked in its title to the one that's just called Wicked (okay, Wicked Part One). I like a musical a lot more than most on here, but I'd never seen Wicked before. Yeah, this one's not one for me. A few of the songs did stick in my head for a while afterwards, and I was never bored, but ... well, it's no Hamilton is it? I am glad Jon M Chu got the big musical hit he should have had with In The Heights, that's nice. And the talking animal subplot intrigued me - more of that in Part Two?

And I've missed one - The Wild Robot which we saw on holiday in the USA. We'd ended the holiday in Las Vegas, and ... no thank you to Las Vegas so we found a cinema to hide from it for an afternoon. This is a beautifully animated film, with a great Lupita voice performance, and it was a solid way to escape to another world for a couple of hours. Worth catching when it appears on streaming.

So that's the lot!

My final 2024 films ranking

1. The Holdovers

2. The Iron Claw

3. A Quiet Place Day One

4. Inside Out 2

5. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

6. My Old Ass

7. Conclave

8. Music By John Williams

9. Civil War

10. The Zone of Interest

11. Young Woman and the Sea

12. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

13. American Fiction

14. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

15. Gladiator II

16. Furiosa

17. Jim Henson: Idea Man

18. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

19. The Wild Robot

20. That Christmas

21. The Bikeriders

22. Carry-On

23. Blitz

24. The Fall Guy

25. Deadpool & Wolverine

26. Dune Part Two

27. Wicked Part One

28. Firebrand

29. Twisters

30. The Radleys

31. Rustin

32. Lee

33. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

34. Beatles '64

35. Alien Romulus

36. Godzilla x Kong

37. Scoop

38. Jackpot!

39. Monkey Man

40. Hit Man

41. Timestalker

42. Damsel

43. Wicked Little Letters

44. Madame Web

45. Joker: Folie a Deux

46. Rebel Moon Part Two

47. Poor Things

48. Drive Away Dolls

49. Argylle

 

Edited December 27, 2024 by HarmonicGenerator

[Hannibal Scorch]

On 10/2/2024 at 3:11 PM, TheScarlettChad said:

Robbie Williams as a CGI Monkey, as a biopic. 

 

This looks amazingly shit.

 

On 10/2/2024 at 4:44 PM, Hannibal Scorch said:

As I saw Megalopolis, I feel I need to see this too. 

And so I did. Better Man kind of works. Well, the chimp bit does, you kind of get over it’s a chimp fairly quickly and didn’t feel so weird.

Theres a sequence in Regent Street which maybe the most jaw dropping sequence I’ve seen in a film this year. As odd musical biopics go it’s no Rocketman. I feel they glossed over things they shouldn’t and focus too much on things they didn’t need to. And some of the other casting (of “celebs”) were poor. However it was much better than it had any right to be and if it was a good 30 minutes shorter, it would have been a far more enjoyable film. In the end it’s a solid film, well shot but left me wishing it wasn’t so padded. 7/10.

[FLips]

Django Unchained

I'll get the elephant in the room out the way first, this is a spaghetti western slavery fantasy wrote by the incredibly white Quentin Tarantino, so I can absolutely see all the very valid criticisms of the film even existing in the first place.

That being said, as an also incredibly white man, I don't relate with the material enough to be offended by it, the same way I wasn't too shaken by the holocaust saviour fantasy he did with Inglorious Basterds. If anything the most offensive thing about the film is the same thing that's usually offensive about Quentin Tarantino films and that is that he insisted in casting himself in it, though surprisingly he chooses not to say the n word in this when frankly he probably could have gotten away with it. He does however, do the worst Australian accent on film instead.

Jamie Foxx, Cristoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio are all absolutely brilliant in this. DiCaprio especially manages to stand out as a disgusting antagonist in a film full of disgusting people. The night and day comparisons between Waltz in this and Waltz in Basterds really is something too, what fantastic range.
Samuel L Jackson has a great turn as well as a right weasely dickhead, and I'll always always always be happy to see James Remar and Walton Goggins turn up in something, and I strike it lucky in this as Remar plays two different characters.

The action is violent and unrelenting, the vengeance swift and merciless but surprisingly the comedy is dark and hilarious. There's one part where a large mob argue about the craftmanship of their sack hoods for a good two or three minutes and the longer it went on the more I was laughing. It was like something right out of a South Park episode.

If you can look past the shaky subject matter, it's a quick moving and exciting two and a half hours. Absolutely flew by, might be one of Tarantino's best.

 

[SaitoRyo]

Been ill over the holidays so have been mostly rewatching stuff as it requires less effort. Felt better yesterday evening so decided to go for something I'd not seen and stuck The Royal Tenenbaums on. Needless to say, it didn't exactly raise my spirits. I'd always assumed it was a fun, breezy comedy about a dysfunctional family and wasn't expecting (or prepared for) so much melancholy drama. On the bright side, I didn't find it to be as as annoyingly twee as I have a lot of Wes Anderson's other films, but it was still a disappointment (even if the cast is dependably decent). 

[Chris B]

Don't Open Until Christmas (1984) - Amazon Prime rental

A schlocky, sleazy Christmas British Giallo, with a serial killer targeting people dressed as Santa? Very much my jam, although a disappointing film - massively uneven, and I've ended up kind of fascinated as to how it tried and failed to create a British Giallo feel.

The thing about those 70s and 80s Giallo films is that they're sleazy, exploitative and gory... but they're also dream-like and sometimes beautiful. Which is really what makes them work. And there's absolutely space to do something similar themed around Soho - but it doesn't work at all. Part of the problem is that we tend towards comedy in places, which really works against the dream-like quality. And while the sleaziness in Giallo films can be kind of beautiful and erotic, it doesn't really work when your nearest cultural reference is Page 3.

It's really frustrating. There's some fun gore, but it's still cheap as hell. You know that sketch-show thing of an obvious rag-doll being thrown from a building? It happens here for real. And the editing is all over the place - there's one particular kill where the background music suddenly stops, and it just stands out weirdly. Throw in a change of director and a broken shoot (with new actors), and you've got an absolute mess. With terrible editing in key places. But... man, there's a shape of something here that could have been unique, by adding that 70s Italian ingredient. The idea of a British Giallo is really, really interesting. But the transplant doesn't work at all.

 

[Dr. Alan Grant]

Didn’t come close to completing my target of 365 films for the year. I only managed 227 in the end. I started the year with Carry On Doctor, finished it off with Interstellar. The low point was the two Sing films and Moonfall. Absolutely woeful. My Pixar marathon was fantastic though. So much so that I’ve planned several follow ups. Carry On films, Spielberg, Hitchcock, Hammer horror, Universal monsters, Disney animated (and the direct to video sequels), Sergio Leone, Bond, Coen Brothers, John Carpenter, Ghibli, Walter Hill and Scorsese. How far I’ll get is anyone’s guess.