NEW: List some movies you've watched recently. Theatre, rental, TV... and give a */10

[DAPUNISHER]

I wanted to like this one; seemed like a good idea that he had a weird brother. Affleck is good as this character. But I lost interest and didn't even finish it.

The end has a good shootout. It felt like an updated western. Skip to when they are in the truck heading into the compound. This is one of those movies where the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes are good, and the in between drags out way too long. Leans into the feel good heart warming stuff to the point where I was asking myself "Who wrote this, a care bear?"

 

[DAPUNISHER]

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That's why I don't respond often. If we have diametrically opposed POVs; cool. That's how it works. Echo chambers suck. I'm not going to change their opinion and they won't change mine.


I also think "You had to be there" is a serious limiting factor with most media. A 12 year old now is highly unlikely to appreciate OG Godzilla the way I did. Or a TV show like Magnum P.I. When I read someone thinks Revenge of the Sith is the best Star Wars, or Terminator 2 is better than the first, I know what age group they are from.

 

[JujuFish]

When I read someone thinks Revenge of the Sith is the best Star Wars

I don't know anyone with that opinion, but I would assume they're probably a younger (relatively speaking) Millennial.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I don't know anyone with that opinion, but I would assume they're probably a younger (relatively speaking) Millennial.

Exactly; younger mills and older Zoomers were in the right age range when it came out. T2 was firmly mills.

I remember seeing the trailer for T2 in the theater - when Arnold said "I promise, I won't kill anyone." The place exploded in laughter. But as it turned out, it was part of Arnold transitioning to more family and kid friendly content. Commando was ground zero for the too much violence in TV and movies crusade going on back then.

 

[stargazr]

@stargazr
i wonder if you're following Jesse Welles?

he *is* the Bob Dylan of today; it would be weird if you didn't follow him, and at the same time having a better opinion of Dylan of ol'.

Dylan did some good stuff, but just some. We all know Blowin' In The Wind, Mr Tambourine Man, Chimes of Freedom .. and then ?
tell me you know what these songs sound like:
2. "Tombstone Blues"
3. "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"
4. "From a Buick 6"
5. "Ballad of a Thin Man"
1. "Queen Jane Approximately"
2. "Highway 61 Revisited"
3. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"
4. "Desolation Row"

the guy had one formula, once he moved away from it, it was just mediocre rock. You like Blonde On Blonde? John Wesley Harding? Nashville Skyline?
Or, who can forget the immortal album "New Morning", with those unforgettable songs,
1. "If Not for You" 2:39
2. "Day of the Locusts" 3:57
3. "Time Passes Slowly" 2:33
4. "Went to See the Gypsy" 2:49
5. "Winterlude" 2:21
6. "If Dogs Run Free" 3:37
1. "New Morning" 3:56
2. "Sign on the Window" 3:39
3. "One More Weekend" 3:09
4. "The Man in Me" 3:07
5. "Three Angels" 2:07
6. "Father of Night"

No, I was not aware of that guy, nor interested in an early Dylan copy. Why would you think I should like that? I'm ok knowing not everyone is a Dylan fan (especially younger people). I don't think I can make that point better than the previous post by DAPUNISHER.

I posted the meme because of your authoritative tone about subjective opinions. I don't mind that in your movie reviews because I don't really know a whole lot about film making. Actually I look forward to them.

I am intimately familiar with the first group of songs you sarcastically mentioned. They're from one of my favorite albums of all time, Highway 61.
Anyway, after his artistic heights of the sixties, he made quite a few great albums.

 

[DigDog]

your authoritative tone about subjective opinions.

it's really hard to not sound like a dick now; but subjective opinions is not the same thing as taste. Or, i mean, they are, at some point on the scale.

a subjective opinion is an opinion of someone who know a portion of the matter being discussed. If a person knows some music, that person has a subjective opinion. Or cars, or food, or whatever. If that person knows ALL cars, all food, all music, then they have an objective opinion.
Taste as well is something that could be objective .. if we knew everything. Sure there's biological differences i suppose.

Many many many years ago i was a young boy who had .. who felt something when he listened to music. Then this asshole (hello Mr Zimmerman) of my teacher completely disillusioned me about music, and i began to see it as something that people do, rather than something that makes me feel.
For a suitable comparison, think about a card trick; magic. When you are just a spectator, you are amazed at what you see. When you start doing it yourself, you start looking at the trick, the technique. You see it as a product, as something which is designed with method rather than with inspiration.

 

[igor_kavinski]

hello Mr Zimmerman

You were his student? For real?

 

[DigDog]

You were his student? For real?

nope - two different people with the same last name.

 

[igor_kavinski]

You see it as a product, as something which is designed with method rather than with inspiration.

Yeah but some art still feels like it's divinely inspired. There's a difference between people pretending to create art and those who create it effortlessly as the ideas flow through them and they don't even know where those ideas are coming from. Kind of like superheroes who have no control over their superpowers. "It just happens sometimes".

 

[DigDog]

Yeah but some art still feels like it's divinely inspired. There's a difference between people pretending to create art and those who create it effortlessly as the ideas flow through them and they don't even know where those ideas are coming from. Kind of like superheroes who have no control over their superpowers. "It just happens sometimes".

absolutely. The music which i "objectively" consider inferior is the one not in this group. It makes sense that one may consider something "inspired", simply because they do not know the other two dozen identical other works just like it.

I've just had a internet argument with someone who was sternly defending some Metallica song off of their Garage Dayz album, i don't doubt that THEY love it, but it's so mediocre compared to the rest of the world of music, even compared to other Metallica songs. But if you have never heard any of those, then you would think it's great.

I suppose you could have such an influence on music, that you go the same way of those famous films we discussed, where you are so thoroughly absorbed by future cinema, that you cannot see anymore what was once new in the old films (like Citizen Kane). Maybe Led Zeppelin? I never cared much for them (aside from Stairway), but maybe they were more relevant before everyone else started copying them.

 

[purbeast0]

Clown in a Cornfield - 7/10 - a random slasher film I came across and it was actually very entertaining. It does not rely on the over the top gore at all either. It felt like an old school slasher film in a way, and it also had a bit of comedy. If you're into horror/slasher movies it's definitely worth the watch, although it's not really scary at all.

 

[DigDog]

Gold (2016) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800302/reference/

Imagine that i made it halfway through before i realized that i had seen this 6 years ago.

Matthew McConaughey plays a modern-day prospector; no pickaxes or sluices, but rather charts and geologists, but same-same. He is also a bit of a rogue, a willing, good man but that will sometimes take on too much risk.
The first part of the film establishes him as this character, we see him as being reasonably well off, but really living on the crumbs of those around him. He also has a girl he wants to keep, but sometimes he has to pawn the jewelry he bought her to get to the next month. Not a thief, not a scumbag, but definitively someone who likes to yell victory and celebrate before he's got the money in the bank.

He's given a prospecting mission to Indonesia, and trying for the big time he feels he deserves, he leaves the area he is supposed to analyze and instead goes in the jungle, in a large basin that, he reasons, is the reason why the gold shows up in the rivers of the region. "something must have happened there", he thinks the basin is the result of a tectonic plate subsiding, and where there is geological activity .. there is gold.

Together with another prospector, the hardest man in the industry, these two set up a prospecting operation, borrowing money, making promises likely to fail, lying and striking risky deals, but in the end they are blessed with a massive discovery of gold.

Based on the IRL story of the BRE-X mining scandal of 1995, it turns out that the other prospector buddy had falsified the geological analysis, and the "world's largest goldmine" had no gold at all. A whole bunch of people on Wall Street made a shitton of money, a whole bunch of common investors lost billions, and the reason behind it is the blind complicity of everyone in the analysis chain not wanting to know, for fear of not getting their portion of the pie (where pie should read "the money of the american people"). Around four and a half billion USD of share value was rendered worthless overnight.

McConaughey does a good job, but it's not a terribly interesting character. There is A LOT of mumbling involved, and i didn't particularly feel for this protagonist; he gambles with his own life, he's somewhat self-destructive, but no Leaving Las Vegas, he's charming but only up to a point. I would say the film's only true worth is as a docudrama about the scandal, because as entertainment it hasn't got much.

My vote: 6/10

 

[MrSquished]

so i watched the first 5 episodes.
it is definitely not great at the start but by episode 3 it actually gets to the plot, and from there on it is watchable and the cliffhanger endings of ep4 and 5 are enough to make you want to know what comes next. i cant tell if they are going for a bit of cringe factor and not finding the right balance.

but yes the showrunners didnt find the right tone or have a solid enough understanding to adapt it properly. skarsgaard does only ok on the humor and a lot better when the action thriller stuff hits. but i kinda think they needed to find an actual comedic actor to get the slacker mentality inside a military juggernaut grizzled veteran personality when you are doing so much inner monologue narration. if you are going to lean so heavily on that mechanic so often, then the actor has to nail the timing and inflection and the director/showrunner/writer has to know what point they are making.

i dont know if it is the books or the screen adaptation but somebody hasnt thought out exactly why you make your security system have full sentience but not understand humanity while having decades/century of lived experience interacting with them. there probably is some nuance to be mined from having human type sentience but not having to deal with most of the annoying/limiting parts of human biology.

as far as who the hippie scientist team is supposed to represent it is a mix. they are contrasted with the corporate endentured wage slaves who have had their spirits broken. the hippies are trying to do thing right by respecting rights and freedoms, but being overly sensitive to emotional consideration. so arguably the more extreme side of liberal privelage. the author of the books is aparently somewhere on the scale of neurodivergent according to some skimming i did, so she may be making a statement on having to deal with pressure associated with people being overly considerate and attentive in social situations being exhausting. there is no seeming redeeming qualities shown for the corpo-types.

you would need a dan harmon or eric kripke type to come in and help get the sick and twisted humor side of the writing down while someone else handles the drama.
7 ish out of 10 for now.

(also they cribbed the mask design from naruto's tobi)

I kept going after reading your post, and finally watched episodes 3,4,5,6 and it does get a lot better. It's fun, funny and a good sci-fi romp. I was laughing out loud on the plane ride home today when I watched them. Will likely catch up this weekend with 7 and 8. And they are only 23 minute episodes.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

Never Let Go - 6/10 - Now streaming on Starz

Halle Berry stars in this horror/thriller about a woman and her children who fear the world has ended and spirits exist that will haunt/possess and ultimately kill them. The house is a safe zone and anything tied to the house will also keep you safe.

This is something M. Night would write/direct, surprised it wasn't him.

Filmed in the forests outside Vancouver, the woods were a vibe, the house was great as its own spooky character with its crypt locker.

The ending leaves the viewer with a lot to ponder - were they real, were they evil spirits, did the world end, is it all dreams.

 

[mikeymikec]

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

LGBTQ road trip movie. A movie that generally made me smile, with some pretty poignant bits in too. One scene in particular was quite cleverly executed IMO, involving the emotional armour that regularly targeted people need to put up to survive, and the character realising that a) he didn't need it with this person and b) how different life could be if he had grown up in a society as accepting as this person was.

---

Twin Peaks S1 (1990)

This is the first time I've watched it, without knowing any 'spoiler' info about it. It had a few quality moments in, like the good acting when the rural doctor admits that he couldn't do the autopsy himself because he knew the girl, but I really don't understand why this series is apparently widely considered to be worth a shit. There's acting so wooden in it that the Douglas Firs deserve the Oscars by comparison (then acting so wildly over-the-top that it's painful to watch), the 80s warm lighting of every single scene to give it this wholesome all-American feel, the 'Invitation to Love' going on in the background that seems like this series is trying to say it's so much better than that when really it's only very slightly better. The FBI agent that's intended to have a quirky, absorbed in the joy/minutiae of his work personality who then acts like taking cues from his dreams is actually the way to work and the sheriffs' department acting like that's completely fucking normal too, as well as throwing rocks at bottles as a method of sound detective reasoning. It comes across as a farce posing as serious fiction, almost like if one of the 'dark humour' episodes of the X-Files was executed as if it wasn't intended to be humorous.

I'm left wondering if David Lynch's works collectively are a bit like the secret of 'The Ninth Gate', that you have to watch them all to find a secret plot hidden in them that actually is worth the slog. After about the third episode of TP it really became a slog though, there were moments where I was mentally begging for it not to get any weirder but to just put its feet on the ground for a moment. It's like this series is a switch with two settings: 1) Weird as fuck, 2) Boring (ie. lacking in what makes a good series such as acting and plot).

 

[DigDog]

Twin Peaks S1 (1990)

This is the first time I've watched it, without knowing any 'spoiler' info about it. It had a few quality moments in, like the good acting when the rural doctor admits that he couldn't do the autopsy himself because he knew the girl, but I really don't understand why this series is apparently widely considered to be worth a shit. There's acting so wooden in it that the Douglas Firs deserve the Oscars by comparison (then acting so wildly over-the-top that it's painful to watch), the 80s warm lighting of every single scene to give it this wholesome all-American feel, the 'Invitation to Love' going on in the background that seems like this series is trying to say it's so much better than that when really it's only very slightly better. The FBI agent that's intended to have a quirky, absorbed in the joy/minutiae of his work personality who then acts like taking cues from his dreams is actually the way to work and the sheriffs' department acting like that's completely fucking normal too, as well as throwing rocks at bottles as a method of sound detective reasoning. It comes across as a farce posing as serious fiction, almost like if one of the 'dark humour' episodes of the X-Files was executed as if it wasn't intended to be humorous.

I'm left wondering if David Lynch's works collectively are a bit like the secret of 'The Ninth Gate', that you have to watch them all to find a secret plot hidden in them that actually is worth the slog. After about the third episode of TP it really became a slog though, there were moments where I was mentally begging for it not to get any weirder but to just put its feet on the ground for a moment. It's like this series is a switch with two settings: 1) Weird as fuck, 2) Boring (ie. lacking in what makes a good series such as acting and plot).

You know what, i find it baffling as well. Because it starts as a straight police investigation, and then just becomes unexplainably weird (S02 gets even worse). But when this show was airing, this was THE show. I will always remember one school friend, who was on the phone with his mother, and idk but the mother wanted something and he threatened her that unless he got his way, he was going to spoil the previous episode which she had not seen yet, and she gave in. Everyone was hooked.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I will always remember one school friend, who was on the phone with his mother, and idk but the mother wanted something and he threatened her that unless he got his way, he was going to spoil the previous episode which she had not seen yet, and she gave in. Everyone was hooked.

Threatening your parents to get your way.

This is the way

 

[mikeymikec]

Trumbo (2015)

Bryan Cranston in the title role in the era of McCarthyism, focusing on the political BS that's familiar to anyone who's watched Oppenheimer (2023). It's not an epic like that film, but IMO it's worth a watch. The two things that got me to watch it were a) Bryan Cranston and b) this scene:

 

[purbeast0]

Squid Games season 3 - 7/10 - It was better than season 2 but not on par with season 1 when it was all new. I still wish that it just ended after season 1 but whatever. I thought the very very VERY end was oh so god damn stupid too.

 

[thebestMAX]

Squid Games season 3 - 7/10 - It was better than season 2 but not on par with season 1 when it was all new. I still wish that it just ended after season 1 but whatever. I thought the very very VERY end was oh so god damn stupid too.

Absolutely agree and now there is talk of an American version hence the lead in cameo by Cate Blanchett. She looked really rough there BTW.

 

[purbeast0]

Absolutely agree and now there is talk of an American version hence the lead in cameo by Gwyeneth Paltrow. She looked really rough there BTW.

LOL that was not Paltrow that was Cate Blanchett.

 

[igor_kavinski]

What a photogenic family. They could have their own movie. They should.

 

[thebestMAX]

LOL that was not Paltrow that was Cate Blanchett.

Drat, I did type Paltrow and then changed it to Blanchett I thought. Trying to do several things at one time. Thanks for the info.

 

[MrSquished]

Nine perfect strangers

I enjoyed season one. Great cast and I like the characters. I like the concept and promise and it was a fun ride. Nicole Kidman is something else. Sure, it could have been shortened a little bit and it had flaws but it was a good show, not great or amazing, but a solid good.

Also, I need to do some psychedelics.

 

[DigDog]

credit where it's due, i watched the first episode of The Studio - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23649128/reference/

and, given that it's starring Seth Rogen, my expectations where somewhere between vomit and diarrhea. And, instead, it's not bad. He doesn't Seth the way he normally Seths. To be clear, he does not play "funny". Maybe because after all these years it's finally dawned on him that he is not funny - or maybe it's pure coincidence. But he plays a tragicomic character, Matt Remick, newly promoted head of a film studio, in a world of Yes Men and empty promises - everyone is the one that will make a billion dollars, except when they don't.

It's too early to give it a vote, the first episode really just lays down the premise, but alone that fact that it didn't make me physically sick is a good sign.