VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[Devon Malcolm]

That's another thing about Tenet, the soundtrack is one of the worst I've ever heard in a big budget film. I think I'd actually have preferred Zimmer to have scored it over Ludwig Goransson.

[Merzbow]

With Nolan's more complex films I get the feeling that he's an admirer of Lynch but has zero humanity and has never had an actual dream in his sleeping life. I don't even hate them either, there's just something so robotic.

[Chest Rockwell]

 

59 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

That's another thing about Tenet, the soundtrack is one of the worst I've ever heard in a big budget film. I think I'd actually have preferred Zimmer to have scored it over Ludwig Goransson.

Speaking of soundtracks I have to say that Brian Tyler has done a really excellent job of Super mario soundtrack. Not a lot of film scores from big movies capture my attention these days as they're pretty bland mostly. But he had so much great material to draw from and did a good job with it. 

(Yes my son is still obsessed with the film and we also listen to the score continually. Currently he's going around calling everything "fresh meat for the grinder" because Luma says it in the film which I love because it sounds a lot more sinister out of context).

[Mr_Danger]

9 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

With Nolan's more complex films I get the feeling that he's an admirer of Lynch but has zero humanity and has never had an actual dream in his sleeping life. I don't even hate them either, there's just something so robotic.

I’ll always appreciate a Nolan film. It’s fun to rip him a bit but there’s always something to take from his films. I’ll often go to see his films in the cinema and never see them again. You read about how much research and science shit he puts in to his films and you see it on the screen but it does come at the cost of character and story. For me his best is still The Prestige. As flawed as it is in parts it’s mostly a ripping yarn about warring Victorian era magicians. 

[LaGoosh]

2 hours ago, Jesse said:

Not to get too into defending a movie that I also don't think holds together on close scrutiny, but I think the overall premise of reverse time holds together. Spoilers (and probably way too many words) for Tenet below
 

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The future at an unspecified time is dying, seemingly due to limited resources and climate change. Seeing themselves run out of time, they want to develop a way to reverse the flow of time and start living backwards. A scientist develops a way of doing this but thinks it is insane and won't actually work the way they think it will - that without the past that brought them into existence they will instead collapse reality, so they use a limited form of it that can reverse an object's path through time to send the knowledge of it (the algorithm) into the past to try to hide it from the future.

An evil person finds it, that person is dying and is happy to see the world go with it, so colludes with the future to try to find the algorithm and piece it together. An organisation (Tenet) is formed to fight it and try to save their present. The real risk to that organisation isn't that bullets go backwards, it's that if you have a perosn who can reverse time, they can seem to anticipate every move you make by waiting until you've made it and then going back through time to interfere (or send that information backwards). That's the "temporal pincer manoeuvre" that's used against them in the car heist scene.

The problem Tenet has is that anything you do in the past can be anticipated by the future, so they hide information from themselves and each other, and why there are so many reveals throughout the movie as our main character learns another piece of information previously hidden from him. That comes to a head in the epilogue, where he realises that not just a specific action (like the car heist, or the final assault on the algorithm's storage) is a temporal pincer manoeuvre, but in fact the entire film is one, where his future self acting in the knowledge of all that has happened before has created an organisation to guide his naive past self into the actions that will counteract the future and secure victory.

I am not arguing that that actually holds up to any scrutiny. But I do think the motives and actions as presented in the movie make sense on the surface, and I think that the premise of "We are in a cold war against the future, who can know everything about us and we know so little about" is a fun setup and the reverse time effects look great. It is best enjoyed as a dumb movie that presents as much more complicated than it actually is, which is why Nolan is the greatest director of blockbuster movies for teens who get straight A's and think they're better than the people around them for that (me 20 years ago when I first fell in love with them)

 

[JLM]

LaWhoosh

[Egg Shen]

Signed up for the 3 months of Mubi for a nugget? Any recommendations? I need to add some shit to the watchlist.

[LaGoosh]

Yeah I always enjoy Nolan's movies (except Tenet). On a first watch anyway. He does great spectacle in a way that is very rare in mainstream cinema these days. I don't think any of them except The Prestige and Oppenheimer (maybe) hold up much or at all on a second watch but I feel like I'll always get my monies worth from a trip to the cinema with one of his flicks.

[SaitoRyo]

No Way Out

Suspenseful 1987 thriller with noirish elements starring Gene Hackman, Kevin Costner and Sean Young. I really liked it, even if the plot gets a little bit too ridiculous in the final third and the twist ending almost spoils it (but not quite). It's got good performances, does a really good job of ramping up the tension and Young gets her kit off, if you're into that sort of thing. 

[Devon Malcolm]

15 minutes ago, Egg Shen said:

Signed up for the 3 months of Mubi for a nugget? Any recommendations? I need to add some shit to the watchlist.

What kind of stuff you looking for? I think they just added Another Round, would recommend that to anyone.

[Egg Shen]

A bit of everything @Devon Malcolm

[Devon Malcolm]

32 minutes ago, Egg Shen said:

A bit of everything @Devon Malcolm

Petite Maman is on there and it's the best film of the decade so far, for me. Lovely film.

Bacurau is awesome, a sort of weird Brazilian crime western. The director's other films, Aquarius and Neighbouring Sonunds, are awesome too but don't know if they're on there.

Three Colours trilogy is one I recommend to everyone. If you haven't caught The Substance yet that's on there, as is Perfect Days, The Worst Person in the World, Aftersun and Decision to Leave.

Free Chol Soo Lee is an excellent documentary, as is Dahomey. Under the Silver Lake or The Wild Goose Lake will fill a crime hole.

Should be enough to get you going.

[Egg Shen]

Lovely stuff

[SaitoRyo]

Eye of God

Fucking hell, what an absolute hidden gem this is! 

It tells the story of two tragic figures and how their lives converge, jumping through time as it does so (but not in that obnoxious way). There's a sense of menace lurking throughout the film, which is set in an economically devasted former mining town in Oklahoma, and when violence finally does erupt it is deeply unsettling, if not terrifying, because of how deliberately the film is paced until then.  

The performances are all first-rate and it features a great cast, with Hal Holbrook, Nick Stahl, Kevin Anderson and, especially, Martha Plimpton, being excellent. 

Seriously, if you're a fan of small-town crime dramas, you'll want to check it out. It's done and dusted in about 80 minutes, too, but didn't at all feel like it was too short. A film that will stay with you afterwards. 

Edited February 18, 2025 by SaitoRyo

[FLips]

Lionheart/AWOL: Absent Without Leave

Dipped my toes into the JCVD pool and it's pretty tepid. I thought the whole thing was fairly rubbish bar a couple of fight scenes. The dramatic performances from all involved are shockingly bad. I understand English isn't his first language but JCVD delivers his lines like Tommy Wiseau, and his trainer/booker played by Harrison Page is abysmal for nearly the entire film, though there is one small section where he settles down a bit to pretend to be a lawyer paying cheques to a widow and you kinda realise actually it's not the actor that's bad it's his script because he was decent there. At one point JCVD I assume accidentally bombs his lines and says "they're not enough tough for this" instead of "tough enough" but they just leave it in.

There's absolutely zero stakes either. The film starts with JCVD's junkie brother being torched alive in an alley and by the time he even goes AWOL from the French Legion his brother is obviously toast and his murderers are in jail. So he's made it to America and is involved essentially in bum fights for no reason. His Brother's widow wants nowt to do with him so really he could just stop and the film could end there but he keeps fighting anyway and when she gets a taste of the big money she finally comes around to him but now it's too late, he's booked in a rigged big fight against Atilla, an unbeatable monster.
By the end of the film you're kinda rooting for JCVD but not for his goals and aims, just for him in general because he's spent the entire film brainlessly being manipulated by everyone he's crossed paths with. The last fight with Atilla is really good though and it does an OK job of wrapping the film in a happy ending if you can accept he isn't just being mugged off.

This is I assume an Amazon thing where they've used AI to subtitle but it is by far and away the worst subtitling job I've ever seen on anything. It really struggles because JCVD is Belgian, his French Legion handlers are both German and his trainer for lack of a better way to describe it is a very stereotypical African American streetwise tramp so I would say 70% of the subtitles were completely wrong. The worst offenders were changing english to french for no reason, and once where they said it was "Lionheart fighting Nutella" instead of Atilla. There was also a bit where it's playing a song called No Mercy and subtitles none of it or even mentions it's playing except when it says No Mercy a bit louder than usual once and the subtitles randomly declare "no mercy" as if someone said it. There's a part during the end where they're happily laughing but there's like 3 or 4 of them doing it and the subtitles freak out and the bottom third of the screen fills with HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
People losing their jobs for this. If you were deaf you wouldn't having a clue what was happening at all.

Best bits:

• 2 minutes of fight hype and JCVD punches a guy clean in the dick and wins. Air leaves the crowd like Undertaker's streak just ended
• Brian Thompson is in it. Always happy to see him
• Atilla fight is booked well. Classic David vs Goliath. Even JCVD's booker has bet against him which is refreshing for a film like this.
• He runs the fights like it's Street Fighter (not the movie) with each opponent having their own costume and stage, including a bum under a bridge, a scotsman in a parking lot brawl, and some hunk at a pool party. Could have done more with it tbh.

Overall there are redeeming qualities but there's a lot of nonsensical guff to wade through to get to the end.

Edited February 18, 2025 by FLips