Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 04:40:28 PM

Login with username, password and session length

What Non-New Films Have You Seen? (2019 Edition)

Started by zomgmouse, January 02, 2019, 08:20:19 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

zomgmouse

New year, new (old) films.

Started my year off with an Australian comedy: The Magician, from 2005. Very dark mockumentary about a hitman. Great little film.

samadriel

Quote from: zomgmouse on January 02, 2019, 08:20:19 AM
New year, new (old) films.

Started my year off with an Australian comedy: The Magician, from 2005. Very dark mockumentary about a hitman. Great little film.

I'm interested; where'd you see it?

Shit Good Nose

War For the Planet of the Apes.  I DID like it, but felt the Kurtz tropes were a bit lame and completely unnecessary, which spoilt it for me.  Also the score belonged in some mediocre mid-00s adventure film.  Weakest of the three, but obviously infinitely better than the Burton one and most of the original saga sequels.

zomgmouse


samadriel


SteveDave

Quote from: zomgmouse on January 02, 2019, 08:20:19 AM
New year, new (old) films.

Started my year off with an Australian comedy: The Magician, from 2005. Very dark mockumentary about a hitman. Great little film.

I saw this film twice in two days with a reviewer friend of mine at the time. The second time had a Q&A with Scott Ryan the director and star. He had loads of plans for his next film that was going to be a zombie film set in the middle of the Outback. But then nothing. The Magician has been made into a TV show now though.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7472896/

Anyway, last night I saw "Raw" and really liked it. I wasn't sure that the big reveal of the ending worked though.

Sin Agog

Watched Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century on New Year's.  I knew one of the classic screwballs was mostly set over NYE so plumped for that, but I think it must have been My Man Godfrey or one of The Thin Mans.  Anyway, such a brilliant film.  I dunno if all his experience in silent movies helped prepare John Barrymore to play the perfect ham, but he is so gottdamned perfect as a theatre svengali who's a bit of a closet actor, dressing up and doing imitations of various members of the cast, and wrenching every ounce of overwrought emotion from his character.  Glad to see that Hawks didn't play down his rather predatory nature as well.  Carole Lombard as his protegee, who quickly takes on her sensei's penchant for melodrama, is typically brilliant as well.  Fuck, I know a lot of peoples got the fuzzy end of the lollipop in WWII, but her death is what really made it a tragedy.

SteveDave

Assassination Nation (2018)

An amalgamation of "Kids", "Mean Girls" and "The Purge"

3/5

zomgmouse

Quote from: SteveDave on January 03, 2019, 10:25:52 AM
Assassination Nation (2018)

An amalgamation of "Kids", "Mean Girls" and "The Purge"

3/5

I really disliked this at the start but it kind of grew on me a little towards the end - but still really not that great at all I thought.

SteveDave

Quote from: zomgmouse on January 03, 2019, 10:41:44 AM
I really disliked this at the start but it kind of grew on me a little towards the end - but still really not that great at all I thought.

Yeah. Plots were brought up and then abandoned- like the Principal who refused to resign and then we never heard from him again.

zomgmouse

For Me and My Gal. Gene Kelly's first screen appearance and he bounds in with great panache, playing an opportunistic vaudevillian whose career is threatened by the war. Judy Garland stars alongside him and is also fantastic. It's a little standard I suppose and also very heavily a propaganda film designed to sell war bonds but it was a good watch nonetheless.

Quote from: SteveDave on January 03, 2019, 11:06:52 AM
Yeah. Plots were brought up and then abandoned- like the Principal who refused to resign and then we never heard from him again.

It was all very haphazard and a bit surface-level wasn't it. Had a bit of hope for it but it was trying a bit hard and yet not hard enough at the same time.

Theremin

Quote from: SteveDave on January 03, 2019, 10:25:52 AM
Assassination Nation (2018)

An amalgamation of "Kids", "Mean Girls" and "The Purge"

3/5

I really wanted to like this - and there are some sizzlingly good moments in it, but the whole thing felt confused and flabby after the first half-hour.

It seemed like it was setting up to be a criticism of sexualised violence and how women's bodies are commodified for other people's pleasure.

It then tries to satirise this by... showing us a load of sexualised violence, in which the main actor's bodies are commodified for the audience's pleasure. Just a load of pure Faster Pussycat imagery, without any meaningful change or analysis.

There's loads of instances of the film criticising the way Media/Culture trains us to look at women's+ bodies - but then immediately switching to slow-mo close-ups of various arses in booty shorts wiggling around.

It was mildly nauseating, given the context of the other material - but I'm really not convinced it was intentional.

Theremin

AND ANOTHER THING

(Spoilers)

I really liked the actor playing the trans girl (Hari Nef), but was absolutely baffled by the emotional arc they tried to give her.

At the start, she's belting out the sort of reactionary statements you might hear from any trans teenager, e.g. (paraphrasing) "I don't give a shit when something bad happens to these Cis people, they wouldn't have any sympathy for me."

This makes total sense, given who she is and what we see happening to her at the start of the film.

Then at the end of the flick - after all her worst fears have been borne out by reality - the writer uses her sparing the Head Jock to implicitly show her 'learning' mercy.

Which is baffling, since half the townsfolk had just confirmed they were all killers-in-waiting. She was right to feel no empathy - those people were monsters.

So why are we pushing towards an emotionally opposite conclusion?

It would have more sense if she'd trained the gun on - then spared - her beau from earlier in the film. That puts more of the power back into her hands, makes sense of the emotional conflict - and even improves the "Not All Men" joke that comes straight after.

gatchamandave

216 minutes blu-ray restored cut of Heaven's Gate

Restores the colours, losing that sepia photography tone that I thought was a choice of the director but turns out to be a wrong turn by MGM.

It makes the film, which I've always liked, more loveable, and some of the secondary characters clearer - i hadn't even spotted Jarath Conroy before but he's a significant character. Who ? Oh, seen Romero's Day of the Dead ? He's the radio operator on the helicopter. Here, he's an evil bastard in a greycoat. Some of the Sweetwater characters become actual characters,  with plot arcs and stuff,  and one can finally see what Cimino was going for.

But you still can't hear a damn word John Hurt says, Sam Watterston is still playing Snidely Whiplash, and Huppert stinks on ice.

If you don't like it, this will not change your mind.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: gatchamandave on January 03, 2019, 09:04:28 PM
216 minutes blu-ray restored cut of Heaven's Gate

Restores the colours, losing that sepia photography tone that I thought was a choice of the director but turns out to be a wrong turn by MGM.

It makes the film, which I've always liked, more loveable, and some of the secondary characters clearer - i hadn't even spotted Jarath Conroy before but he's a significant character. Who ? Oh, seen Romero's Day of the Dead ? He's the radio operator on the helicopter. Here, he's an evil bastard in a greycoat. Some of the Sweetwater characters become actual characters,  with plot arcs and stuff,  and one can finally see what Cimino was going for.

But you still can't hear a damn word John Hurt says, Sam Watterston is still playing Snidely Whiplash, and Huppert stinks on ice.

If you don't like it, this will not change your mind.

A masterpiece and, in my opinion, Cimino's best film.  The Deer Hunter can get to fuck.

zomgmouse

For the entirety of that post I thought you were talking about Days of Heaven and I got severely confused until SGN said Cimino and I thought "Cimino didn't direct Days of Heaven... oh. I see."

zomgmouse

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey. Thought it was moody and interesting and had no idea about the flip to the modern world until it happened. Was really into it until it was revealed it was all just a dream which ruined it a little for me, though it ended pretty well. I really liked the atmosphere and earnestness though.

Fans of The Doug Anthony Allstars will be pleased to note the presence of Paul Livingston aka Flacco.

phantom_power

Quote from: zomgmouse on January 04, 2019, 12:01:24 AM
For the entirety of that post I thought you were talking about Days of Heaven and I got severely confused until SGN said Cimino and I thought "Cimino didn't direct Days of Heaven... oh. I see."

I watched Days of Heaven for the first time the other day. A fucking amazing film, even more so considering how fortuitously the final product came about. Every bit of it, from the visuals to the voice-over, the naturalistic yet theatrical acting and the way the story is told through montage, little vignettes, glances and stares, hit me right where it hurts

SteveDave

Await Further Instructions

Would've been a good Twilight Zone episode but Rod Sterling would've come up with a better ending.

This is maybe one for the horror thread but still not quite sure would call it good, as such. A Serbian Film. Jesus fucking Christ, there is a film I will not be watching again.
Not quite sure the point of it but am assuming there are some metaphors to Serbia itself in the subtext. I will read up further as I don't know that much of it's history and turmoil of relatively recent years. 
Anyone else watched this?
Hardly one for the popcorn or nachos and cheese!! Disturbing is the only way I can describe the content yet I was taken along with the protagonist's plot line and where it was going, never expecting to see some of the awful scenes that came along with it. Definitely not recommended for the faint hearted and those looking for some joshing japes.

amputeeporn

Quote from: phantom_power on January 04, 2019, 10:09:04 AM
I watched Days of Heaven for the first time the other day. A fucking amazing film, even more so considering how fortuitously the final product came about. Every bit of it, from the visuals to the voice-over, the naturalistic yet theatrical acting and the way the story is told through montage, little vignettes, glances and stares, hit me right where it hurts

A gorgeous and hopelessly sad film filled with amazing faces, performances, set pieces and scenery. But, unlike most high art, it feels absolutely effortless. Stunning, and so sad that we didn't get 20 more years of movies from him until (the admittedly maybe even better) Tree of Life.

Haven't watched the stuff he's made afterwards as I hear such middling things, but must get round to Thin Red Line at least.

mjwilson

Saw The Passenger at the cinema last night, which is on one of these re-release tours. It had the scariest BBFC certification I've ever seen ("contains a scene of a real execution", wtf). Very smudgy picture quality - what were they filming on, tissue paper?

phantom_power

Quote from: amputeeporn on January 05, 2019, 08:49:44 AM
A gorgeous and hopelessly sad film filled with amazing faces, performances, set pieces and scenery. But, unlike most high art, it feels absolutely effortless. Stunning, and so sad that we didn't get 20 more years of movies from him until (the admittedly maybe even better) Tree of Life.

Haven't watched the stuff he's made afterwards as I hear such middling things, but must get round to Thin Red Line at least.

I felt the same way about The Thin Red Line as I did Days of Heaven, just a stunning piece of work. Completely pulled me into its atmosphere and kept me rapt for the whole running time. What would seem pretentious in other people's hands is transcendent in his

zomgmouse

Quote from: mjwilson on January 05, 2019, 12:00:22 PM
Saw The Passenger at the cinema last night, which is on one of these re-release tours. It had the scariest BBFC certification I've ever seen ("contains a scene of a real execution", wtf). Very smudgy picture quality - what were they filming on, tissue paper?

Is this the Antonioni one or something else?


DJ Solid Snail

Watched Prince of Darkness (1987) last night, one of the few John Carpenter films I'd not yet seen. All I knew of it was that stunning main theme, which Adam Curtis uses a fair bit, and the dream sequence DJ Shadow sampled in Endtroducing.

Loved it. Very weird, a bit messy, but absolutely oozing with style and atmosphere. A lot of set-pieces that might have been goofy in the hands of any other director were genuinely creepy and unnerving, probably helped by its wonderfully unsettling score. Good stuff.

(Hello again, by the way!)

Sebastian Cobb

The 9th Configuration. It was decent, but I tried to watch it a few nights ago and my mind started wandering so I sacked it off. I probably gave up just around the end of the first act where it's all farcical. I think it would've landed better with me if I'd waited a bit.

Still a good film though.

Ferris


Mister Six

#28
Ben Wheatley continues his long-standing tradition of films that I could almost love save for a couple of inexplicably poor decisions in Free Fire. Loved the opening half-hour - well-sketched characters, genuinely entertaining dialogue, looks rather splendid (although they could have leaned a bit harder on the 1970s grit and a bit less on the generic orange-and-teal post-processing shit) buttttttt once the gunfire starts he completely fucks up spatial awareness, so there's no sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else, and consequently how much in danger any character is at any given moment.

I still hugely enjoyed the rest of it (especially the storming cast), but that boneheaded decision/oversight stopped it from being just about perfect. It's now my second-favourite Wheatley film after Sightseers.

Quote from: Pinckle Wicker on January 05, 2019, 01:53:10 AM
This is maybe one for the horror thread but still not quite sure would call it good, as such. A Serbian Film. Jesus fucking Christ, there is a film I will not be watching again.
Not quite sure the point of it but am assuming there are some metaphors to Serbia itself in the subtext. I will read up further as I don't know that much of it's history and turmoil of relatively recent years. 
Anyone else watched this?

It's basically a meta-critique of the Serbian film industry, which is so underfunded that anyone wanting to make something half-decent has to write for festival crowds. And festival crowds only want stories of suffering set in or after (or that are metaphors for) the break up of Yugoslavia. As a consequence, filmmakers who actually want to make a stoner comedy, or a light-hearted space opera, or a whimsical kids' film, have to mine the pain - real or imagined - of their countrymen and make grim shit.

From Wikipedia: 'According to Spasojević, the character of Vukmir [the director] is "an exaggerated representation of the new European film order ... In Eastern Europe, you cannot get your film financed unless you have a barefoot girl who cries on the streets, or some story about war victims in our region ... the Western world has lost feelings, so they're searching for false ones, they want to buy feelings.'

Apparently it's also a jab at "political correctness", which these days sounds a little bit too much like "owning the libs" for comfort.

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on January 06, 2019, 01:31:34 AM
Paddington 2.

Just as lovely as the first one.

Lovely but too slight, I thought. The first one does a wonderful job of balancing the antics with proper character development for all the characters. Paddington 2 basically sidelines the Browns for most of the runtime until they have to be wheeled out for the big finale, and the majority of the film is just Paddington arsing about in prison while Hugh Grant does generally villainous things with ease. Hope the third one has a bit more meat on its bones.

Ferris

Quotethe majority of the film is just Paddington arsing about in prison while Hugh Grant does generally villainous things with ease.

Yes exactly! I liked it anyway. Genuinely guffaws at the deft animation with the hair trimmer things.

QuoteHope the third one has a bit more meat on its bones.

Didn't know there was a 3rd one in the works! That's good.